Re: PICS anyone?

On Thu, 27 Feb 1997, Kenny Elliott wrote:

> I am very interested.
>
> Infact I am tring to get together with several ISP's now so that we can
> work on building a list of "unwanted" sites for our child/student users.

These are both neat ideas (implementing PICS and building lists of sites),
but I don't think either is realistic.

The PICS protocol is designed for flexibility and power rather than
simplicity and speed. It works fine on a single workstation, but I think
you would see significant performance degradation in a proxy server.

Building a list of inappropriate sites is a very large project, which I
doubt even a large group of ISPs would have the resources to do
effectively. For example, we rate approximately 2000 sites per day and
are currently blocking close to 100,000 sites (or partial sites). We have
a sophisticated system for finding suspect sites, a full staff who review
them (with people working from 8 am until midnight), and a fancy system
for them to do the rating. I find it hard to imagine a group of ISPs who
could duplicate what we have.

I think we are doing a good job, but our customers still find
objectionable sites occasionally. A lesser effort than this would result
in a list which would probably be worse than not having one at all, as it
would give a false sense of security.

Just my two cents...

Kevin

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Kevin Fink <kevin@fink.com> N2H2, Creators of Bess
 http://www.fink.com/ 1301 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1501
 http://www.n2h2.com/ Seattle, WA 98101
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 (206) 971-1451 VOICE (206) 971-1460 FAX (206) 680-7666 PAGER
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Fri Feb 28 1997 - 10:37:34 MST