Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition

RSACi

The Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) was formed in the mid-1990s in response to several moves within the U.S. Congress to regulate the content of children’s video games. Congress was moved to action after a number of video games were produced in which the goal of the game was to brutally murder live-action figures, some of whom were wearing only the scantiest of outfits.^[201] The entertainment industry successfully argued that it could police itself and offered to adopt a voluntary rating system that would let people purchasing a video game determine the levels of gore, violence, and sex that the program contained.

In conjunction with the development of the PICS standard, the World Wide Web Consortium worked with RSAC to develop a modified version of the RSAC rating system—RSACi. Despite the fact that this rating system was designed for rating web sites and was created by the W3C, it still read like a rating system for video games and not for web sites. For example, a web site could be said to “reward injuring nonthreatening creatures.”

Table 23-1 shows the RSAC ratings that are implemented in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 and above. Microsoft’s Internet Preferences panel is designed to allow parents to create “content advisors” that will prohibit the display of certain kinds of content. Figure 23-2 shows a window from the content advisor. In this case, the content advisor is loaded with the RSACi content rating system. The browser has been configured so that ...