[LINK] .xxx xxx'd

[Alastair Rankine]

On 02/04/2007, at 1:54 PM, David Goldstein wrote:

> Hi Alastair,
>
> PICS still exists in a child protection sense. First there was RSAC  
> that amalgamated and merged into ICRA (Internet Content Rating  
> Association) and now ICRA is part of the Family Online Safety  
> Institute. See http://fosi.org/icra/.

Thanks for the link David.

It seems that PICS as a technology has been superseded by an RDF  
vocabulary.

I was actually pretty impressed with that site. I was able to  
generate a label in both PICS and RDF format and apply it to my site  
very easily. Green light is good!

As always the problem with self-labelling is the potential for  
deliberate abuse or honest misinterpretation. FOSI seem to make a  
reasonable attempt at this, although I only discovered their  
comprehensive label guidelines (http://checked.icra.org/ 
labelguidelines/) *after* creating the label. Also the language  
ratings were sufficiently vague that I ended up simply picking the  
middle-of-the-road rating in lieu of the missing "pretty clean but  
occasional f-bombs".

I'm happy that the technology allows expression of "contexts", as in  
"this image of the Birth of Venus contains nudity but in an artistic  
context". Unhappily though there is no "sleaze" context .