Oh no!! What about the Children!!

in response to the silly piece of research, expounded yesterday, on pervy kelantanese people, the kelantan state government has announced that they'd like to work witn software firms to "wipe out online smut"... they plan to ask the software firms to come up with tools to disable children and "others" from accessing online porn... the state youth committee chairman is barking up the wrong tree...

"Internet pornography is pornography that is distributed via the Internet, primarily via websites, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups." --- wikipedia

okay, usenet is largely unknown by most people except the oldies or hardcore techies like me... hardly anyone use them these days... so, that's not a big deal... and i doubt that anyone uses usenet to trade porn these days... it's just not a very viable method to use...

a much better method is with p2p networks.. if there IS any company in the world that has software that can discern and stop the distribution of online porn through p2p, they would make more money selling that piece of software to the RIAA/MPAA to stop the illegal distribution of copyrighted music/movies... that's a larger market to tackle, than porn... since no one has been successful at stopping that problem, i doubt that anyone can solve this one easily...

finally, with websites, there are many existing filter products in the market.. but how do these filters work?? they mostly work by filtering out websites based on white/black lists... then on top of that, they may do some bit of content based filtering to catch websites that are in the gray area... however, these pieces of software are easily circumvented by anyone who wants to do it..

i was actually asked to review a fairly sophisticated porn filtering software, a few years ago, by a VC... i was fairly impressed by the technical merits of the software... it was a fairly smart piece of code... it used some fairly sophisticated image processing to figure out what's porn and not... however, even it could NOT solve the problem... and i told the VC why... the reason is simply because, this is not a "technical" problem... and throwing more technology at it, just isn't going to solve/slow it...

the best thing to do, is to get parents to monitor their childrens' internet activities... this doesn't mean sitting behind your kid and looking over his/her shoulders.. some simple precautions can be taken... for example, by placing home computers in open areas that are easily visible instead of keeping computers inside the bedroom...

and of course, education... talk to the kids about sexuality... teach them about the birds and the bees... that's what's seriously lacking in our society... sex is a taboo subject in many families... however, it's something that's perfectly natural... so, kids will naturally get curious when the time comes... and that curiousity needs to be satisfied...

i'm starting to sense that a lot of the social issues in our country can actually be solved, if parents just cared a little bit more...