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Australian Govt. Proposes Internet "Panic Button" For Kids
CuteSteveJobs writes "Children who feel they are being bullied, harassed or groomed online could call for help instantly using a 'panic button' on their PCs under a plan by the Australian Government's cyber-safety working group. The button shall look like a 'friendly dolphin,' who will connect the child victim instantly to police or child protection groups. Australian Internet Censorship Advocate Hetty 'Save the Children' Johnson says the Internet needs something like 000 or 911. Will this be another scheme wasting taxpayer dollars in lieu of parental supervison, or could it actually work? Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet? Can flaming and trolling be classified as bullying?"
http://www.panicbuttons.com/
My wife has one of those on her keyboard, it's pretty funny.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
How long then until a worm emerges that floods the govt with hundreds of thousands of fradulent calls, making the signal to noise ratio too burdensome to navigate?
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as long as the panic button dials the parent's cellphone/ sends a text to the parent/ sends an email to the parent
not to some intrusive government bureaucracy with an agenda having dubious additional goals beyond just good parenting, not tailored to the specifics of each different parent-child relationship, and costing tax dollars
otherwise, its basically just a good business idea for someone to invest in and flesh out
i look forward to unintentionally humorous late night tv commercials for the internet panic button
"mom! i've fallen into porn and i can't get up!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_fallen_and_I_can't_get_up!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You know the absolute first thing that will happen is that some pedo-hacker will use a PC virus to hack into the Dolphin and send all "panic" help requests to themselves.
Your attitude is exactly why people don't ask for help when they're in a bad place. The result is school shootings, suicides, and other depressing events. Not just among teens either. Adults in general listen to your kind of belittlement and think they're weak if they ask for help.
This is a particular problem in first responders and members of the armed services. They see all kind of horrible crap, need help in dealing with it, and are afraid to get it because they don't want to seem "weak". This is a particular problem in the Army, which is seeing a spike in suicides lately.
Mind you, I'm not equating a bullied teenager with a GI who's seen his friends blown up by an IED. But they do have one thing in common: they need for it to be easy to ask for help, and people like you make it hard.
"Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet?"
Err NO, exactly ZERO (0) children have ever been sexually abused by the internet. Nor for that matter have any children EVER been sexually abused over the internet, on the internet, or even around the internet. The internet has undoubtedly been a tool used by sexual predators to get access or to provide information on the location of children which they would then prey upon and abuse, but just like a gun has never shot anyone by itself, a interconnected system of computers has never abused or neglected a child, it takes people to do that....
http://www.pandys.org/whatissexualabuse.html
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
children cannot be abused by the internet. My question is, how is it that the "defenders of children" never have a clue about children? How many law enforcement resources does Australia plan to throw at answering calls from kids who just wonder what the pretty button does, who think the police should arrest Bobby for calling him a troll, who get scared of the "2012" preview they stumbled onto, who just want to stir things up? If we really want to "protect" kids we'd be better off banning idiocy like this and restricting parenthood to those with the capacity to do the job.
WTF happened to setting limits as a parent? This seems to be the classic "surely we can find a technical solution to a people problem" hole. What about requiring parents to take child-rearing classes that cover internet predators and how to limit children's activities on the 'net until they are ready to handle the mostly adult online world? This seems like anti-virus tools; the OS is broken so let's build a band-aid that covers the holes. It seems like it would be better, a la the US Head Start program, to educate parents early in the process so their kids don't get into these situations until they are mature enough to handle them.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Police officers have a very limited amount of training in what the law actually is, and they are not known for being the brightest people.
I wouldn't put much more trust in what a cop says is legal than in the average person on the street. Police are not attorneys, and are not judges. They might be able to identify an armed robbery, but if a legal question is much more complex than that, most cops are lost. Their training consists of a very small subset of law, with an emphasis on acting first and thinking later.
The good ones will just walk away. The bad ones will make an illegal arrest, causing someone some serious inconvenience.
And that's not being anti-police. That's being realistic. You want to fix it? Require cops to have law degrees.
When our grandparents were kids, if they got bullied, their own parents would respond by teaching them how to fight. Hell, even when I was a kid, my parents' reaction to bullying was usually along the lines of "...well kick his ass then - as long as you didn't start it, you won't be in trouble from us for finishing it".
I'm no grandparent, but when I was a kid and came home from school one day crying and with a lump on my head from some other kid throwing a stone at me, my grandmother took me out, hunted this kid down and set me on him. Yeah, she pulled me off him when she figured he'd had enough...
I never failed to stand up to a bully under my own steam ever again.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
What strikes me most about this is that the dolphin shape has been decided, while other details, like: what will the button actually do? where do we buy/acquire the tech? is this a good idea? are still undecided. It's like in the hitchhikers guide book where they are back in time on earth with the golgafrinchams and they are wanting to invent a wheel, and the most important decision to them is what color (colour in the book I suppose) to make it.