 |
|
 |
|
| |
Mediabyte |
 |
Don't worry papa...let the kids surf
Publication: The Hindu Business Line
Date: April 18, 2001
Are you afraid to leave your child alone to surf the Net while you are at work? Do you come home late night and clandestinely track which sites your kid has visited? You are not the only one.
According to a survey done by ORG-MARG for Pitara Kids Network Pvt.Ltd. a children's Internet portal, 82 percent of parents (from an interview base on 600) in Mumbai and Delhi find it important that their children not able to change upon objectionable material on the Net, specially pornography, indecent and nude photographs, sex chats and sexsual abuse sites, hate and violence.
And they have every right to be paranoid considering even the most innocuous sounding domain names such as whitehouse.com, Fun.com & TERI.com lead to lurid porn sites. The phenomenon also crosses the borders, with a Digital Research Online Survey of 693 parents showing that 66 per cent of them feel that sexsually explicit material available over the Internet is a growing problem and 60 percent aware that it is too easy to accidentlly chance up on this explicit material.
So what does one do? Stop kids from access to the web? "No, make the Web a safe place for children" says Mr. Ajay Jaiman, Founder & CEO of the Pitara Kids Network. And it's towards this end that their next product is heading - the first browser specially for kids to be launched early next month.
To be called Krowser, it will allow the child the full freedom to surf and explore the web, yet ensure that he or she doesn't stumble upon objectionable Web sites. The Krowser is to be a specialised piece of software that replaces the conventional browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
Though it functions like a regular browser in every way, yet at every point the software checks the appropriateness of the site being visited.
The Krowser will have a data base of over 200,000 Web sites across the world, with a battery of human editors constantly reviewing and adding to this database to make sure that the user has access to as much as possible appropriate material.
The krowser has what they call a validation server where children's can sail through the database's 'green channel', request for sites on the 'orange channel' and have no access to sites dumped in the 'red', objectionable material channel.
"The Krowser is unique and fail-safe", says Mr. Jaiman, whose product is targated at the below 14 age group that loves to surf the Net, but can chance upon objectionable material very easily that could be very disturbing psychologically.
"Parents and teachers of young children are extremely concerned about growing pornography, hate and violence in the new media. But we would hate to deprive children of this extreamly powerful tool of learning and entertainment", he says. And hopes the Krowser will be the answer.
|
|
|
|
|
