Subject: [apps-discuss] Usability of draft-nottingham-safe-hint (was: Call For Adoption: draft-nottingham-safe-hint)

From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 19:46:30 -0700

Thinking about it further, this raises a great point: As currently
defined, "Prefer: safe" is actually quite useless because the
specification does not provide any basis upon which to determine
whether content is "objectionable" or not. The challenge is that it
attempts to address the problem in the wrong way.

Consider a school. It rolls out a bunch of tablets with the "Prefer:
safe" boolean option set. Two different students go to two different
websites, each of which say they support "Prefer: safe" but have two
entirely different interpretations of what the currently undefined
concept of "objectionable content" means. The result is that the
school ends up having to apply it's own filtering anyway, despite the
presence of the "Prefer: safe" option, making the use of "Prefer:
safe" pointless and meaningless beyond making someone feel good.

The problem lies in the fact that "safe" is not bound to any clear,
testable condition. For instance, we could say that a server honoring
the "Prefer: safe" preference SHOULD NOT return any images, videos or
textual content depicting sexually explicit or sexually related
subjects. That would be a testable behavior that could be expected to
be remain consistent across implementations. Without such a clear
definition of what "safe" means, the spec, as currently written, is
largely meaningless.

- James

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karl Dubost <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Call For Adoption: draft-nottingham-safe-hint
To: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Cc: IETF Apps Discuss <[email-masked]>

Le 22 juil. 2014 à 01:28, Murray S. Kucherawy <[email-masked]> a écrit :
> This note begins a Call For Adoption for the above document to be adopted as an APPSAWG working group item.  The Call ends on August 8, 2014.

potential for ratholes discussions.
a "safe" preference is strongly attached to a cultural context.
Cultural contexts are related to groups and often physical access to
places with a notion of sealed environments.

A magazine stand will put some publications into a dedicated
environment (hidden, special room, etc) according to the law of the
country (or the province). The mechanism of enforcement is often done
through the barrier of a human person controlling the access. Same
thing for alcohol, tobacco, amusement park (height), etc.

Putting a label on the browser side is indeed a way to advertise that
you do not want to receive some type of content, but the issue is that
"safe" has no meaning with regards to the Web because the cultural
concepts associated with the word "safe" is highly dependent on the
community and geographical location of the person using the browser.

This document is likely to lead to long discussions, will not solve
anything in a satisfying way, will be abused in all the ways you can
imagine. It will be even a potential source of additional tracking for
ads businesses along "This person is probably religious or a child,
let send targeted ads."

--
Karl Dubost 🐄
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:49:58 -0400

> whether content is "objectionable" or not.

And yet it is deployed and useful.

The issue isn't that it's "quite useless", but that it's imperfect.
It *is* imperfect.  But it's good enough, and often that's the key to
having something be quite useful.

Barry

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:42:42 -0700

> And yet it is deployed and useful.

Where? I've only heard about two browser's so far. I know the "call for
implementation" just went out but folks seem to keep implying that this is
already out there being used. Would be great to know where... Would love to
test it out.

> having something be quite useful.

Imperfect in that the spec does not provide enough detail to enable interop
or even testable implementation. Even for the intentionally low bar that's
been set for the Prefer header, "objectionable" is far too loose a
definition.

- James

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 06:32:20 -0400

On 7/24/2014 1:42 AM, James M Snell wrote:
> 
> On Jul 23, 2014 8:49 PM, "Barry Leiba" <[email-masked]
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> Where? I've only heard about two browser's so far. 

The 'report' we've had about existing practice was quite basic.  As part
of the initial input to describe the proposed work, that was fine.

To the extent that engineering decisions need to attend to the installed
base -- such as using its experience to constrain design choices -- it
would help to get more detail about the extent of actual use and the
known efficacy (and the basis for knowing it.)

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 09:10:49 -0400

> whether content is "objectionable" or not. 

Correct.  The semantics of "safe" is defined by the server.  That's
part of the design of this feature.  

I also don't find this useful, but the objection is not reasonable,
since the very design of this is that the service provider decides
what's safe.  The point of the bit is to tell the service provider, "I
want the safe version."  

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]