The Underscore Archives

My tuppence on this.

Agree it's a very important subject and delicate and sensitive.

I'd suggest holding a sort of focus group with children of varying ages in
conjunction with one or two local schools and their parents.

Our fourteen and twelve year old boys uses a lot of the Bebo's, Facebooks,
MSN, online gaming etc etc. and I'd expect the s3x, p0rn language he uses
with girls of his own age (who are equally bad and very grown up) would get
himself blocked from such a filtered site as key would be activating a lot
of the keywords himself.

I'm pretty sure that paedos aren't dumn and that they use the same txt spk
language, ask for mobile numbers and personal details as often as the
children themselves do. They arrange meet-ups etc. (maybe girls moreso).

Yes it's a problem, but how big is this problem to children these days ?
Don't they perhaps want to be left to their own devices, to claim ownership
of technology and the online world.

Personally I would be slightly more at ease if the site in question had a
'monitoring' in place using real people and that parents took a more active
role by having open communication and an active interest with their own
children and what they're up to.

Talk to kids, talk to parents, talk to schools.

It could be a solution that's needed and yes it could be an opensource tool
that people can use all over the world.












On 31/10/2007, Richard Davey <rich at corephp.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Matt,
>
> Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 3:58:22 PM, you wrote:
>
> > Hrmm... I agree that it is a problem that needs a solution, but
> > isn't something that matches strings and the like likely to be about
> > and successful as most internet content filters?
>
> I guess it depends how you do it. I will be dedicating more time to
> this in the coming weeks, but off the top of my head I envisage the
> idea being about building up a profile on someone rather than
> searching for a specific string.
>
> For example adults write in a very different way to children. The use
> of punctuation, lack of txt speak, choice of words, etc can all be
> meaningful. As can the time of they day they post a message or even
> where they post from (a lot of children on ours sites post from their
> school networks).
>
> Identifying key phrases or word combinations I think are paramount -
> each one could carry a 'weight', and the higher the conversation gets,
> the higher the alarm flag raises.
>
> For example there are only so many ways to ask someone for their phone
> number, or where they live / which school they go to / if they have
> any brothers/sisters / how old they are, etc.
>
> You could also identify the tone of the message - searching for
> 'negative word' frequency (i.e. are they being angry / hostile).
>
> This isn't about stopping the conversation, it's about notifying the
> recipient that we feel it's getting "too personal" and to talk to
> someone about it.
>
> > But I presume unlike filtering the web in general, with a social
> > networking site you can build up relationship graphs to work out who
> > is talking to whom and come up with some kind of rules.... eg person
> > X chats to 10 different people and asks them all for their phone number.
>
> Exactly. This is a very real issue for a number of sites I work on
> (ShaunTheSheep.com / WallaceandGromit.com) which draw large
> numbers of young children, lots of whom enjoying talking to each
> other and forming friendships.
>
> One idea that we came up with was to introduce 'Parental Controls' on
> the site - so the parent of a child could enter some key information
> (such as their postal address, childs mobile number, etc) - and this
> information turns into a black-list. If their child uses any of those
> terms during chat it gets screened out immediately and the parent
> notified.
>
> However this only addresses the 'switched on' parents, who quite
> probably are clued-up enough to teach their children about the dangers
> of grooming in the first place.
>
> It's the other group we need to try and help as well. I don't have a
> solution for this, but figured there must be enough collective
> developer intelligence out there to make it happen.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rich
> --
> Zend Certified Engineer
> http://www.corephp.co.uk
>
> "Never trust a computer you can't throw out of a window"
>
>
> --
> underscore_ list info/archive ->
> http://www.under-score.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/underscore
>



-- 
Thanks,

Karl


M.       07894 552 671
E.       karlspringfield at googlemail.com