Wow, just had a proper look at OARS (Open Age Ratings Service) used in GNOME Software, elementary OS AppCenter, etc., and it’s problematic as hell.

Thank goodness they removed “homosexuality” from the rating (wtf?) but it still represents a very limited world-view.

e.g. “nudity likely to cause offense”

To whom, exactly?

“Intense: Explicit nudity showing nipples…”

Men, put your shirts back on!

Under language: profanity (“defined as blasphemous…language”)

Not a secular rating, then…

The pushback and attitude displayed here by the maintainer tells me OARS isn’t fit for purpose – and likely no centralised content rating system is.

Again, we can do better than to prepetuate the limited worldview of trillion-dollar US companies like Apple with “open” versions of their “moral” frameworks based on profit maximisation.

github.com/hughsie/oars/issues

github.com/hughsie/oars/issues

github.com/hughsie/oars/issues

github.com/hughsie/oars/issues

“As of 2020, various countries have laws which criminalise lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people. In order for software and content to be distributed in those countries without breaking the law, and possible reprisal, it is necessary to be able to tag software and content which contains LGBT references, so that it can be hidden in those countries.”

Like, seriously, fuck you for ever writing this.

How the fuck does someone write something like this and think, yeah, this is fine?

@aral Quite a few Commonwealth countries have laws that make Homosexuality illegal.

I wonder how many of these countries are linked to what is being mentioned here.

As usual this is not even in the news.

@zleap Of course this is a colonial pest still lingering today. The Victorian prudes imposed their twisted view on sexualities to the colonies, actively eradicating the most often more sensible traditional cultural handling of the spectrum of human sexualities. @aral

@carl @aral Yeah, I just hope all this colonial stuff does not get cancelled, we need to learn about it so that hopefully the same mistakes are not repeated in the future.

@zleap This is not over. The "mistakes", as you like to call the colonial crimes, are being made today. @aral

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@carl @aral

Well yeah, but I am not sure how much of our colonial history is taught in schools.

We did after all bring railways to many countries.

Most of which seem to work better than our own rail ways do here.

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