The UK culture secretary has fanned an old flame: PG/PG-13/R style ratings for websites. It’s an old idea, one some of you may know I had some involvement with back in the day. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the first browser to support PICS, a W3C standard system for allowing websites to be rated, and I was the PM for the IE team that built the feature.

The thing never took off, which most of me thinks is a good thing. However it did help in some way to prevent the Communications Decency Act from being enforced, and possibly influencing the 2003 decision to remove the indecency provisions from the Act.

PICS makes for a great study in the challenges of public policy, technology and censorship. The coolest concept it had was the ability for any rating system to be used, and for anyone to create one, dodging the entire problem of defining obscenity, good, bad or anything. It was a meta rating system: a system for creating and using rating systems, and tools for parents or administrators to decide how many systems to use and what permissions were allowed. But that was also the Achilles heel: there was never anything to market to parents. And when we did put one of the PICS supporting systems in the box called RSACi, a system designed by Stanford professors, it confused the issue on what PICS was, what Microsoft was doing and who these RSACi folks were. The only system everyone know was the movie system, and that was really all they wanted to see.

More problematic, no solution was offered for how to rate a zillion websites, or a zillion websites with a thousand pages. There was no real business in making a web rating system.

Worst of all, the project was an easy target for censorship and Orwellian nightmare fantasies (Lawrence Lessig wrote “Pics is the Devil”, Wired 5.07). It all turned out to be moot: few even remember what PICS was, much less use it. I’m not saying those fears were unwarranted, but the idea died for reasons that had little to do with what folks were so worried about. Here’s a good summary of the whole is PICS censorship question, written by one of the folks who wrote the PICS Spec.

PICS also makes an excellent case study in the history of innovation. The technology of PICS was truly novel and at minimum an interesting approach to a difficult, subjective, and highly charged problem. But it also divided people sharply, created new problems, had major flaws, and took on big risks, all factors in most innovations, successful or not.

And of course, in my entire experience with the whole world of parental controls and censorship, the funny thing was people rarely ever talked about the neighbor’s kid theory. It goes like this: who cares what you do as a parent if when your Johnny goes over to his friend Fred’s house, Fred being the child of parents who didn’t bother to install whatever magic software you do, they go to whatever websites they like. Kids are exceptional at figuring out which friend’s parents have the most lenient rules. They’re also always better at hacking new technologies than their parents are. It’s all running up a steep hill if you asked me. Technology doesn’t seem to be the solution here. (I do realize the “neighbor’s kid theory” doesn’t apply if the blocking takes place at the government level).

Anyway, there’s a ton of history in this story and lots to learn. And don’t get me started on the problems with the USA PG/PG-13/R/X system, oh boy does that have some problems. Anyway, it’s a shame none of it gets mentioned by the Telegraph. I’m sure this issue will come up every few years from now until forever.

See also:

• ESRB: The U.S. system for rating video games.
• MPAA: The U.S. Movie rating system. (And Roger Ebert’s excellent criticism of it).

Posted in Innovation, politics, pop culture | 6 Comments »

A curiosity of the recent coverage of the $50 billion Madoff scandal is the sense of shock and surprise that professional investors make big, possibly illegal, mistakes in 2008. The same year half our banks fell apart, major investment firms went bankrupt, automobile companies beg for money, and governors offer to sell senate seats for cash.

In times like these a book gets mentioned by some experts called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of crowds. It’s a big fat book chronicling the silly, absurd things large groups of people have bet their money on and lost. Some read the book to feel smart smart that we ourselves didn’t do any of the stupid things our ancestors did. But these days an update to the book is well overdue: an entire chapter can be written about the delusional wonders of 2008.

I’m left with this opinion: there will always be pyramid schemes, frauds and market collapses. It’s inherent in complex systems, things like democracies, free-markets and blogospheres, that these things will happen. Unavoidable actually. I’m not saying we should accept them or not try to reduce their number and impact (hello, SEC, where have you been?), but they will always take place. The reason? Trust.

A pyramid scheme, often referred to as a ponzi scheme, is well defined by wikipedia as an unsustainable business model, where the people who invest are not aware of how unsustainable it is. (In a ponzi scheme, victims are mostly just out of luck, in a pyramid scheme, victims are often part of the crime since they promoted the pyramid).

As the story goes the legendary Charles Ponzi told his potential investors in 1919 he could return 40% on their money in 45 days. FORTY PERCENT. At a time when the interest rates hovered around 5%. Why was he able to get their money on such a ridiculous promise? For one reason: they trusted him. That’s it. He found a way to earn their trust. The details don’t matter for the moment. Lets ask what is trust?

Trust is using what you know about someone to compensate for what you do not know. I trust my brother. I’d trust him to, I don’t know, say, watch my dogs. Now once he has my dogs I can’t be 100% certain what he might do when he watches them. He might decide to cover them with chocolate syrup, or set them loose in the meat section of my local supermarket, I can’t prevent him from doing these things. But I trust he won’t.

Similarly you trust the staff at McDonald’s not to spit in your food, the woman behind you at line in the bank not to make silly faces at the back of your head, or the gas you pump into your car to be actual gasoline and not turpentine. Our daily lives hinge on trusting all sorts of things we are too ignorant or busy to verify. And from time to time some people will take advantage of this trust because they are mean and because they can. It might only happen 1 or 2% of the time. Small enough not to make us stop trusting these things. But fraud, abuse, and pyramid schemes will always exist as long as we are free to choose who to give our trust to. Laws penalize people after they betray our trust, not before.

Look at the list of people whose trust was betrayed by Madoff: Steven Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, fashion mogul, Carl Shapiro; real-estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman; the European bank HSBC; and on it goes. These high powered people, despite their teams of lawyers and advisers had their trust betrayed. It’s sad and shameful what happened, especially since many of their funds were tied to charities, but there’s nothing we can do to permanently prevent this from happening again. To hire someone to manage your money will always be based primarily on the wonderfully imperfect, intuition dependent, amazingly tricky thing called trust.

How do you decide who to trust? All I know is after writing this post, I’m looking at everyone I see with a suspicious eye :)

Posted in philosophy, politics, pop culture | 11 Comments »

Through the magic of netflix and xbox, I can now watch the 80s TV series MacGyver. And what a joyous snarkfest it has been.

I watched the show as a kid, and I’ve written about him in reference to creativity (See do constraints help creative thinking?). But watching the show now was mind blowing for reasons I never expected.

The pilot episode is an amazing cultural artifact all on its own. Pilots are always weird. Watch the first episode of your favorite shows and you’ll consistently find the humor and pacing off, the acting stiff, and the focus of the show often much different than what the show became known for later.

In this case it’s clear the pilot, and the whole show, were made well before the hyper realism of CSI, and the procedural logic of Law and Order. Back then you could get away with a TV hero who lives in a mansion sized NASA grade telescope laboratory, defuses the cheesiest looking nuclear missile in twelve seconds with a paper clip, does his own voice overs, works as apparently the only agent for a squad of the most incompetent secret agent bureaucrats ever on TV, charms the girl, defuses more bombs, stops acid leaks with food, while cracking corny geekish jokes and smiling in a way that suggests he wouldn’t mind an early death, a suggestion that redefines the meaning of bizarre given how frequently the writers remind us how good natured, polite and wholesome this country boy is as he does good things like save the world 5 times an episode.

Forget the fun of wild ingenuity and brains over brawn I remembered the show for - which is there in moments - instead the show works on an entirely deeper level as a time warp back through television history when this sort of fantasy was acceptable entertainment. The only way this show could work today would either be to go towards CSI, and become an inventors 24, or run towards satire and camp like Get Smart, making fun of hero shows by winking at the audience. But MacGyver sits right in the middle in no mans land, which makes the pilot episode a fascinating watch.

The pilot episode is also available online, for free on fancast.

Posted in pop culture | 6 Comments »