.kid
Posted: September 10th, 2005The EU backs plans for .kid TLD. A TLD for kids is a good thing for businesses that have websites for kids. What sort of upsets me is why the EU is backing it:
“It is felt that educators could not solely rely on technology, but also that businesses could not escape their responsibilities under the pretext that parental control would suffice and that governments had a duty to introduce rules that would protect the weakest members of society.”
Sigh. Just what society needs: more censorship. This is a scary trend. In the US the censorship knob was turned after the thing with Janet Jackson at superball. Boobies! Pffft. Big deal! Then there was the thing with GTA. More nonsense. Some people seriously need to lighten up and polititians that try to start witch hunts should be burned alive. That said, some censorship might be needed – it’s probably not a good idea to have young kids look at pictures from the crime scene of a serial killer or scenes from a gay marriage.
From a technical standpoint:
DENY: ALL
ALLOW: .kid
is a very good idea but not enough. Continuous content inspection of all .kid websites would probably be too expensive… well… expensive. So I can certainly see ISPs not caring. Governmental and Non-Governmental organizations would help. But it still wouldn’t be enough. I can only think of a good solution: the parental control software would still detect “bad pages” the way it does now and block them. .kid websites could be broken into and harmless content be replaced with “bad stuff” or they could simply be setup by “bad people” and harmful content could be made less obvious, hidden three or more clicks away – perhaps enough to escape more relaxed human detection. So what would happen when parental control software found what it believed to be “bad stuff” in a .kid website? It would block it, log it and later present it to the administrator (e.g. one of the parents) pointing out why it considered the content of the site “bad”. The software would allow then allow the site to be reported as bad, either to a government agency, an NGO, the software maker or a combination of those. Additionally crawlers would search through all the .kid websites in search of “bad stuff”. These would have to use techniques to avoid and evade detection 
No software will be able to detect all “bad stuff” in text/html let alone in flash animations, images and stuff. The safest solution is to rely on all the above AND make a list of “good sites” and restrict browsing to them. Again, these “good sites” could be broken into so in the end, it is impossible to secure unsupervised browsing. Not to mention that it would certainly cripple the “internet experience” way too much…
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