Re: Agent-mediated access, kidcode critiques, and community standards

James C Deikun <jcdst10+@pitt.edu> wrote:

|You miss my point: the kid would be buying gum, not cigarettes.

Really?  The kid would be buying net.access to much more than gum and cigs.

Finding porn on the web right now is akin to if a kid stumbled across adult
magazines in the trash in the street and picked them up.  No one turned the kid
onto the free material, but it is hardly realistic that the person who left
this recycling out and accessible should have put up a fence around the
questionable material.  Controlling access to for-pay service is a tractable
problem.

Returning to the content filtering question, perhaps a scheme based on trust
and communication between parent and kid (family values?) would be more quickly
implemented, effective, scalable and less influenced by the puritanism and hype
of American presidential politics [sic].

The UA could be rigorous in maintaining a log of sites accessed by the user
(user name, URI, <TITLE>, time spent on page, images downloaded), perhaps even
saving compressed HTML for a while.  Parents and kids could discuss beforehand
appropriate sites for the kid, with the kid knowing that a log was being kept.
 Parents could review the log and take whatever appropriate action they
considered necessary if the kids abused the privilege.

Combined with brute force client-side site/object regexp filtering, for
disobedient kids whose parents still wanted them to have net access, this would
be a good interim step until the hard work gets done.

For those who say that replacing browsers is slow, and that this should be done
at the proxy server level, wait until we see the advertisements (probably
unwanted on a web page near you) offering a 'safe' browser for only $149.99!
 Aren't your kids worth it?  There are suckers born (again?) every minute, and
someone could get very rich off this.

-marc

Received on Monday, 26 June 1995 18:57:59 UTC