Microsoft’s Craig Mundie is talking about Passport and trustworthy computing now. He’s presenting a pretty vanilla prespective on all these topics. His presentation of DRM focuses not on “protecting copyright” but on “ensuring that people can have access to
He’s talking about keeping kids away from inappropriate material now; it sounds good, but I get suspicious about their moving toward the emotionally-charged, hard-to-argue terrain of child protection. They’re demo-ing an approach to parental controls that steers children to “age-appropriate” materials, that sets up barriers against “age-inappropriate” material, and (get this) emails the parent when Junior wants to look at a page that isn’t specifically permitted.
Imagine, for a second, getting an in-box full of messages saying that Junior wants to go to sites X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Now you go to all these sites, decide whether Junior can cope with them, pass along okays—how long does that take?
How soon before Junior has a strong incentive to learn to outflank the barriers? (And the notion that they won’t be able to depends on parents’ naïve assumption that their children find computers as incomprehensible as the parents do.) This looks like a very superficial scheme to me.
Mundie treats MS’s Palladium project as though it were a necessary response to security and DRM questions; he completely bypasses the question of the hardware’s relation to other OS platforms. Linux? Mac OS?
Posted by AKMA at October 10, 2002 11:03 AM | TrackBackMy whole deal with filtering is: trust. I never needed a filter at home because my parents trusted me. They trained me properly and knew I wouldn't be looking at inappropriate material. I think the emailing scheme is a bit ridiculous for a parent/child relationship. Especially since, as you note, kids can get around filters.
Now at my Christian college we have filtering for the Internet. I get very upset with it because I lose functionality (images.google.com, google's cache, any translation software). It all boils down to lack of trust between the administration and students. They already do a bigger version of the Passport emailing idea... blocked site accesses get sent to a faculty member who is charged with dealing with people who hit the block page too much.
Posted by: eliot at October 10, 2002 01:25 PMPeter McKiernan of Microsoft has asked me to clarify that the Passport and the parental filtering functions are separate; here duly noted.
Posted by: AKMA at October 11, 2002 11:11 AM