Re: Last Call: <draft-nottingham-safe-hint-05.txt> (The "safe" HTTP Preference) to Proposed Standard

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Yoav,
At 12:49 24-10-2014, Yoav Nir wrote:
>Stephen Farrell has made some interesting points 
>about what "safe" might mean in other cultures. 
>I think the failure is much closer to home, so 
>let's assume for the sake of argument that 
>everyone affected is mainstream American 
>(although neither Stephen nor I are Americans). 
>So obviously anyone would consider porn to be 
>"unsafe", because we don't want the children to 
>see it and we don't want it at work. A rabbit 
>teaching the alphabet to kids OTOH is "safe" 
>([1]). But those are the easy types of content. 
>What about political content? What about 
>political content that is non-mainstream? Even 
>inflammatory? Is it safe? For whom?  A signal is 
>useless if there is no agreed-upon semantic to 
>it. Yet the draft punts on attaching such a semantic.

I think that Stephen and you raised good 
points.  I was testing some stuff recently and I 
noticed that Google did not serve the same 
content.  There are other sites which do not 
allow me to view some content because of my 
location.  In the first case it is for regulatory 
reasons whereas in the second case it is for 
commercial reasons.  When it comes to porn it is 
viewed in a country as a matter of free speech 
(see Free Speech Coalition).  The good part about 
Mark's proposal is that it is closer to the 
user.  Obviously, it is far from perfect (re. safe hint).

What about political content which is deemed 
illegal?   Some governments might block the 
content.  Some governments use other means to 
tackle that.  Would the IETF standardize 
that?  There have been proposals about interception; they did not go far.

>Section 3 mentions YouTube. That is actually a 
>perfect example of what I mean. Sites like 
>YouTube, deviantArt, Flickr, and Wattpad, even 
>Wikipedia provide user-generated content.How are 
>they to decide what is and isn't "safe"? They have several choices:

Some of the sites mentioned above monetize 
user-generated content.  There is a commercial 
incentive for them to figure out the semantics of 
"safe".  I doubt that Wikipedia would die anytime 
soon (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative ).

The question I would ask is whether Mark's 
proposal puts the user at risk.  I don't see an 
increase in risk.  The proposal does not attempt 
to touch encryption stuff.  It might help to 
reduce the pressure to standardize state interception services.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy