Protecting the minors (was: ACS PR condemns ABC's search hacker)

[Kerry Webb]

Steve Thomas said:
(after responding to earlier posts)
>
>The question of access to such material by minors is a separate issue. Lots
>of material is already published (by traditional means) which is unsuitable
>for minors. The owner of an "adult" bookshop is legally bound to deny
>access to minors. When the legislators get around to it, I have no doubt
>that they will demand similar controls for net access, so maybe we'd better
>start looking at ways and means now. Don't we at least have a moral duty to
>prevent minors accessing "adult" material? (And I don't just mean "dirty
>pictures"; there are lots of more legitimate types of information to which
>children should not be exposed without guidance.)
>
I've been thinking about a "classification" field for HTML documents, to be
set by the originator, and which could be interrogated by client software,
say in a kiosk or public library environment, or in the home.  Not easy to 
implement, but I'll suggest it in the hope that it can be developed to
something useful.

Kerry

Kerry Webb
Director, Systems   National Library of Australia   CANBERRA   ACT   2600
k.webb@nla.gov.au     Phone: (+616) 2621535     Fax: (+616) 2733648
http://cliff.nla.gov.au/~kwebb/