Archive for June, 2009
China - From one extreme to the other
On Monday, we wrote about the new Chinese mandate requiring new PCs to be shipped with a government controlled internet filter called “Green Dam”. By Wednesday, China’s People’s Daily had come out with an opposing editorial titled “Filter does not do it, education does“.
People’s Daily appropriately compliments China’s stated goal of protecting children, criticizes the potential spying on of citizens and also appropriately questions the extreme inflexibility of the government mandated censorship. Then, Peoples Daily travels from one extreme position (mandatory government censorship) to the other extremely naive position that filters are not needed and education of children is sufficient protection.
“Experts say that instead of blocking those harmful graphics from children, a more practical approach is to start early in teaching children how to evaluate what they are watching or discovering on the Internet. ”
Who are these unnamed, shadowy “experts”? What People’s Daily (as well as their comrades at the ALA and ACLU) fail to tell you is that education alone will never be sufficient:
- Education alone will never prevent naturally curious children from straying into dangerous alleys.
- Education alone will never adequately explain to a child the very confusing and perverted images that get more hard core every year.
- Education alone does not preclude accidental exposure (90% of children unintentionally stumble upon or are tricked into bad places.)
- Education alone will not protect children against smarter, deceptive, 40 year old predators.
Education alone is the equivalent of teaching your child to swim and then throwing her overboard into shark infested waters!
Conclusion: Bsecure believes that the best approach to keeping your child safe is a balance of parental education, school education and advanced filtering technology (controlled by parents).
Chinese Filtering Software - Use It or Else…
As of July 1st, the Chinese government plans to enforce a mandate that all new computers are shipped with content filtering software, according to a June 8 report by Wall Street Journal. This new software is attractively named “Green Dam Youth Escort ” designed for “constructing a green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment, and preventing harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people.” While the “green” and “environment” label may be a stroke of marketing genius - reportedly enough to get Al Gore sign up for a free trial - we think there’s something more to the story. Bsecure is all for giving parents and consumers great technology to prevent “poisoning young people”, but there’s a few other red flags (get it?) that should warn the average Chinese guy that this is not your typical content filter. In this case, it’s the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, NOT the parent who;
1) decides what content is blocked. The PC owner doesn’t have any editorial control, user profiles or configurable options.
2) decides which filter vendor everyone will use.
3) can potentially record and view private information.
While the Chinese Ministry of Public Security reports that only pornography is being blocked and that the filter can be turned off, network level filtering efforts in the past have been surreptitiously aimed at controlling political and religious speech. We’ll keep an eye on the situation. In the meantime, we’re kicking ourselves for not being the first ones to trademark “Green Dam Youth Escort”.
Bing – A Porn Surfer’s Dream
It’s a difficult decision, but it’s now time that Bsecure opened a blog on parental controls. There’s always been a fine line between providing parents with information of emerging security threats concerning child safety, and at the same time providing already tech savvy teens with potentially damaging information.
What’s pushed us over the line? Its Microsoft’s new search engine called Bing. Bing.com, unlike other search engines, has designed an “autoplay” feature that makes it particularly easy for kids to circumvent old fashioned filtering and preview images and full motion video/audio clips of hard core porn without having to leave Microsoft’s site. It now doesn’t matter if a teen’s old fashioned filter blocks fetish.com, because fetish.com videos and a million others are now conveniently hosted on Microsoft!
Any child in the world can now sit on the single Bing URL all day long with an instantaneous, unlimited, free library of hard core porn videos. On the savvy teen side, the search for the pot of gold has ended since bing is so fast, easy and circumvents most traditional filters in use. Although we’re sure that creating this porn surfer’s dream was not Steve Ballmer’s intent, hopefully Microsoft’s internal child safety policy and social responsibility issues are being reviewed and adjusted as we speak. In the meantime, Bsecure (formerly Bsafe Online) will continue to automatically filter the video and image portions of Microsoft’s Bing, as well as filter keywords for explicit and unwanted results.
Loss of Innocence
The employees at Bsecure are motivated about what we do: protecting families online. We represent 35 families ourselves, and realize what a difficult job it is to raise and protect a family in today’s complex world. We see the same daily headline stories that tell of other children (and some adults) addicted, abducted, approached and exposed on the Internet.
What we also see is that most of our new filter customers sign up AFTER someone gets in trouble. After several years, we’ve come to realize that most parents think “other children need a filter, but my child is good and wouldn’t ever do that” or even “my spouse wouldn’t do that”. Even with great house rules, keeping the computer in an open area and education, 90% of children are unintentionally exposed to pornography. Most all kids are naturally curious and innocently click into danger zones through a suggestive pop up, banner ad, bikini link etc.
What doesn’t make the daily headlines is the “accelerated” loss of innocence that kids now go through. We’re not talking about harm from exposure to simple images of the naked human body. The kind of material Bsecure is battling is two clicks away and contains every weird combination of ages, positions, genders, orifices, objects, animals and even body functions. An entire generation of young children are being exposed, with unknown consequences, to material that is too morally disgusting to even give examples of! While some on the far left think pornography is healthy and normal and doesn’t harm anyone - we don’t agree.