Rapid Application Development for the masses.
censored distributed easy extendable fast informative intelligent lean maintainable open (source) portable pretty rfc'ed robust secure transparent version numbers virtual
[The following concerns matrix-DFS, a sub project of matrix-RAD.]
Children and adults both have access to the Internet, but see it from different perspectives. There are certain things that
societies beleive will somehow corrupt children's minds if they ever learn about them. These things are different in
different societies. Adults are usually trusted to do their own thinking, and so they only need to be protected from the
things they don't want to know. Adults should be able to learn about the things that children are not allowed to
know, even if other adults don't think they should. All three groups of individuals are catered for with marix-DFS :
A child is protected from whatever their society frowns on.
An adult is protected from the things they frown on.
An adult is always able to access the things that other adults frown on if the adult wants to.
Getting societies to stop frowning on so much inocent stuff is something that matrix-DFS does not try to do.
We could use one of the ratings standards, like PICS for instance, that rates
stuff according to how violent it is, how sexually explicit it is, or whatever.
The big problem with those is that the rating itself is a lot of hard work that
will expose the rater to a lot of violence or sex that they might not want to
see. Considering that most censors are deciding what others will or will not
see, they tend to be the sort of people that don't want to see the stuff.
The solution is to introduce the concept of positive censorship. Currently only
negative censorship is rampant. Negative censorship is when someone doesn't want
everybody else to see something. Positive censorship is when someone wants to see
the stuff that others don't want everybody to see.
The way it works is that the people that don't want to see stuff will keep an eye
out for suspicous looking stuff (www.sex.com for instance). They will not actually
look at the site, but pass the URL onto someone that likes looking at sex. The
person that likes sex will look at the site, and rate how much they enjoyed it.
This information is entered into the system, and the next time anybody looks at
www.sex.com, the rating is used. If the viewer likes sex, then they are informed
that other people that like sex think this is a good site, and the viewer will
probably enjoy it to. If the viewer doesn't like sex, they are advised to stay away
from www.sex.com. If the person hates sex, they don't ever see that
www.sex.com exists.
This scales very well, the internet oracle is a good example of why. The actual rating
should be averaged from several people, and there should be more than one way to get
something rated. We could also do the pgp thing, and try to weigh individual ratings
by how much the user trusts the raters opinion. An example - the user is a hetero male
that is very interested in sex, his name is Dick. Bob is a gay male that has rated
www.group.sex.com as being very good. Alice is a hetero female that rated the site as
being OK. Dave is a hetero male that didn't like it at all. Dick knows Bob, Alice and
Dave, and he knows their sexual preferences. Because Dave is the only person with the
same sexual interests as Dick, Dick's matrix-DFS client should tell him that it is a sex
site, but he is likely to be disappointed.
This file was last modified on Tuesday, 26-Oct-2004 18:01:52 EST