Cool. Now get me an adult search engine to replace Google.
I want all the porn, pirate films, leaked documents and superinjunctions, just like the good old days before the search became all censored and pussified.
Anonymised search engine page found on 'kid-friendly' search site
When it comes to seeking a magic bullet that will protect children from the evils of the internet, the first casualty is all too often common sense. So it appears in respect of the latest in a long line of child-friendly projects – Kiddle – which launched itself on to the scene a little over a month ago as a self-proclaimed “ …
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 11:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE:Excuse me sir, there is a storm in my tea-cup.
Totally agree, I fail to see where the problem is. If they do or do not use the anonymous search engine in the back. It doesn't return any of those undesirable page if using the correct page, if you use the unadvertised page which has now been deleted, yep, but then you would need to know about it, and it appears no one did until it was found.
If it uses the anonymous search engine, how is that not kid friendly. How is a company not tracking what your children do and then not targeting advertisements at what your children search for not kid friendly?
-
Monday 11th April 2016 11:14 GMT Tam Lin
True, but a RUSSIAN storm in your tea-cup.
The Russians eat their children, and now they're trying to capture ours by code reuse - specifically, proven web-search cache technology. Since the chunnel, they can do that. No, it's true, I read it queued at Tesco. Or maybe I read it on-line at elReg.
-
-
Tuesday 12th April 2016 15:09 GMT Jane Fae
Re: storm in my tea-cup
er, no.
The kiddy-users don't need to be able to use Peach or equivalent. They just need a grown-up to use it and find it for them and publish the result somewhere.
Agree: as far as i am aware, that did not happen...at least not in a big way. But if there is an exploit, do you think everyone is going to be shouting about it so it gets closed down.
I watch what my son (aged 11) does online. He does not discover exploits by himself, does not hack mainframes. Yet.
However, he is clearly going on to youtube and other spaces where he listens in on what the grown-up hackers and the like are doing and every now and then quite surprises me by knowing a lot about something i thought entirely beyond his range...
-
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 11:51 GMT Flocke Kroes
The other problem
I have no problem with a child avoiding tracking (I would be a bit surprised that one made the effort). A way around the porn filter is a significant failure, but hopefully they can fix it. The thing that really caught my attention was that trying to access lukol by https caused certificate not trusted, certificate expired and a redirect to http. The form tag's action attribute was http.
If you use lukol, your ISP will be able/required to log the address and search key and hand the details to your local Stasi.
-
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 23:32 GMT David 132
Re: Is it just me
My startup - an afterschool club where children learned to play the violin - failed.
Well don't be disheartened; pick yourself up and move on to the next winning business opportunity.
May I suggest a national chain of shops where parents can hock their kids' unused toys and outgrown clothes in return for money?
"Kiddie Pawn".
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 17:32 GMT Old Handle
I'm not sure what's supposed to be sinister about offering children more privacy online, I'd have thought that was a desirable thing. Clearly they shouldn't have left up a forgotten page that returned unfiltered results, but that's fixed now, and I doubt if many kids have a "fuzzer" handy, so no harm done. As far as the results on the intended search page, it looks like they're doing pretty good. I entered a few obscure terms that could have yielded nude results and the "worst" thing I was able to find was some classical art.
-
Tuesday 12th April 2016 15:20 GMT Jane Fae
A beta product launched as finished
which site? Lukol or Kiddle? I have no probs finding smut via the Kiddle site...so maybe you just don't have a dirty enough imagination :)
Tbh there are a whole series of problems with Kiddle. First, that it claims to offer a degree of edited search that i don't really believe. Perhaps an overclaim. Mostly, they are offering google safesearch with some filters over the top.
When first released, it had some VERY dodgy views on sexuality generally: gay, for instance, was a "bad word"...as was dyke, lesbian, transexual and child abuse. So, as with many such filters....kids looking legitimately for info that would be helpful to them were barred from finding it...and much more severely barred than using other filter systems.
They...sorta...fixed that.
However, forget the argument about what kids SHOULD be able to see: this software promises a level of extra security to parents, which means enabling kiddle and therefore enabling the backdoor, when that was active.
So in return for a promise of extra security, kiddle was actually delivering a lot less....
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 17:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
This kinda makes sense
You don't want your kid's searches being tracked by advertisers and cookies being saved to track their movements around the web, so an anonymized search engine makes perfect sense. What doesn't is an unfiltered search engine, but there is absolutely no reason you can't have anonymized filtered results, this site clearly screwed up in a major way on that front!
-
Monday 11th April 2016 18:21 GMT Cynic_999
I'm not sure what I am supposed to be outraged about. Is it the fact that someone is offering children access to an appropriately filtered search engine without being stalked by the government and other 3rd parties, or is it the fact that the web designers had inadvertently left an undocumented and unlinked page that accessed an unfiltered (but otherwise harmless) search engine which no child would ever be likely to find?
Or perhaps the outrage is about offering free of charge something that may threaten the profits of businesses such as "Net Nanny" which offer expensive products that prey on parents' paranoia?
-
Tuesday 12th April 2016 05:08 GMT DiViDeD
@ Cynic_999
"I'm not sure what I am supposed to be outraged about"
Me neither, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of a nice bit of outrage.
I'm mad as hell and I'm just not going to take it anymore!! Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children??!!
Gnash, fnarrrrrrr!
Nurse, Quickly! The screens!
-
Tuesday 12th April 2016 15:23 GMT Jane Fae
Re: @ Cynic_999
it got fixed. SO little actual outrage. However, the backdoor was there and by allowing children to access kiddle on the premise of "safe searching", any parent or isntitiution adding kiddle to their list of exceptions was also opening up access to something definitely NOT kiddle.
-
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 19:34 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
Protecting kids
The only way to protect kids from the internet is by separating them from it. Consider Wikipedia, one of the sites that is pretty much guaranteed to be on a whitelist of websites for children, yet it is chock full of porn. In fact, an entire copy of "Debbie Does Dallas" is hosted on the Wikimedia servers, not to mention the images that show up on the articles for sex acts.
Even fixing those issues, children will still find porn on the internet and kiddie fiddlers will still be able to contact them. Nothing in the universe can stop a 13 year old boy from getting access to porn. Leave a boy alone for a couple hours with even a completely disassembled machines with no networking, modems, or even any other connection and in no time, that machine will be up and running and connected to several porn sites. As for the predators, the law and society has pushed them so far underground that by-passing filters and exploiting weak points in child-protection software is second nature to them.
-
Monday 11th April 2016 23:11 GMT Someone_Somewhere
Re: Protecting kids
> the law and society has pushed them so far underground that by-passing filters and exploiting weak points in child-protection software is second nature to them.
I think I get what you're saying but, apart from the aberration/abomination that was the P.I.E., I'm not sure that the predators were ever anywhere /else/* - otherwise we'd have known about Jimmy Saville a /lot/ sooner.
* no-one /I/ know has ever told me they harbour unnatural urges towards children. In fact, I think most people would be happier admitting they lust after sheep!
-
-
Monday 11th April 2016 19:59 GMT EveryTime
The message, for those that missed it, was that this was just another slapped-together thing that promises parents "safety", while inside the brightly colored padded surface is jagged rusty metal and broken glass.
On an somewhat unrelated topic, I was recently surprised to find that Twitter is a massive porn trove. I went there with a fresh browser and found the experience much different than my usual logged-in, ad-blocked view. Amusingly some PG rated pictures require an extra click, adjacent to hard-core movies and animated GIFs that autoplay.
-
Tuesday 12th April 2016 15:28 GMT Jane Fae
Thank you, yes. Because there are loads of people on here who don't see why children should not have access to such things...and that's their point of view.
But that wasn't kiddle. Read back through all the gushing press reviews of about a month or so back and this was a special safe for kids search engine when, as you say, it was nothing of the sort.
Other thing, of course, is that there are some institutes out there...expert reviews and the like...who swallowed the hype hook line and sinker without doing ANY due diligence on the product.
The lesson...probably of greatest value to snake oil salespersons....is: if you wan't to make a quick buck, label your new thing "safe for kids"...and don't be too exercised about what's under the bonnet. Because most people will swallow whatever you offer under that label without asking too many questions.
-
Biting the hand that feeds IT
