Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

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That is absolutely meaningless. What is bad content? The header doesn't tell what the client considers 'bad' or not 'safe', it's a bool.

Given that, I see these possible outcomes

- the client's admin might not care about this site at all (effort to hide stuff would be wasted?)

- the client's admin might consider content 'unsafe' that seems fine/okay to the site operator => Blocklist, failed to archive what you suggest

- the client's admin might consider content 'safe' that the site now refuses to share => Curse site and Mozilla, switch browsers and/or consider that site broken and the operators morons (similar to 'breaks zoom on mobile devices' today, for example)

Your comment about the bool, got me thinking. This would have been better implemented if it was thought of along the lines of movie rating system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_rating_system

However, this got me thinking that across cultural lines there are a lot of shades to what is "safe". So a website based in Austria might want to restrict different content than a website based in Australia, and who knows where the "browser" is based.

Of course your comments about the site actually implementing anything/correctly still apply.

I vaguely remember in the early days of the web (95-96?) there was a hopeful rating system very much like what you get for movies. I can't remember what the header was, but it was formatted something like "Violence 1; Sex 10; Drugs 5; Gambling 0". For obvious reasons it didn't catch on.

Sure, all those outcomes will happen, since servers and filters will have to implicitly agree on what is "safe". But the type of content blocked isn't random; there are a few prevalent concepts and terms which site operators are likely to follow.

That said, I think the implementation should have an admin-controlled site whitelist and even a way to disable the header even if parental controls are enabled, to prevent (3).

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