Internet filtering for children (or other reasons) that would actually make sense

[jack]

I was recently debating in another journal about new suggestions for internet filtering, ostensibly to prevent children seeing child-inappropriate sites. This is normally met with -- imho justified -- cries of doom. However, it does seem likely that there would be ways to approach it which would actually do some good -- if you, as a reasonably technical aware person, were proposing something, what would it be?

Suggestions:

* Not support political censorship
* If it requires a large investment of manpower (eg. great firewall) be upfront about where that comes from
* Should fulfil stated purpose of allowing concerned non-technical parents to protect their children from inappropriate content to at least some extent
* Should not be a massive expensive unworkable pointless joke
* Should be clear if it will work a country at a time (probably not) or be a small but incremental improvement over large classes of website.

Whatever the government is thinking about is almost certainly unworkable. But if there were something NOT ridiculous which could be suggested instead, that would actually be better than just "it doesn't work", or at least make clear to people who DO want a solution that it may be expensive.

It might even have positive side effects if (eg) pure spam domain names were caught in the crossfire.

Comments

[ewx]

Customer activates their own filter, most likely by ticking a box in their ISP's setup software. Perhaps implemented on customer's ISP-supplied router but could (less conveniently) be part of the desktop software.

• Minimized scope for censorship because everyone chooses their own filtering. (Inappropriate censorship is inevitably possible, but you can at least limit it to the people who've turned on filtering of some sort.)
• Entirely funded by people buying filtering software/hardware or ISPs and equipment vendors bundling it (i.e. either competing on features rather than price or being big enough to submerge the costs).
• Plainly as least as workable as any global approach (it can just make the same decisions but implement them more locally) and in some cases more so (any intensive processing, e.g. to mechanically recognize unwanted material, is both more distributed and implemented on hardware that spends most of its time idle; this is an embarrassingly parallel problem).
• How fine-grained it is, whether it operates on whitelists, blacklists, pattern recognition or whatever is a matter of user choice between the different available options or local configuration.

Of course, this covers the existing implementations, which plenty of people seem perfectly happy with.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

This suggestion is more or less a restatement of the existing system which doesn't work.

[ewx]

You still haven't produced any evidence for that claim. And since our last encounter started with you making false accusations against me, you're not very credible.