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Censorware Failure: Kiddle's "Child-Safe" Search Engine (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a bid to protect young internet users from inappropriate content, a new visual search engine designed for children has launched this week. Kiddle.co filters its results so that only 'safe' sites are displayed and page descriptions are written in simple language. It also claims to get rid of indecent images and 'bad words.' However, tests have revealed that the odd risque image will still slip by into the listings. The words 'gay' and 'lesbian' have also controversially been removed from the 'child-friendly' platform. Other reports claimed that references to killing rabbits, naked images of Vanessa Hudgens and Khloe Kardashian's sex tape had initially slipped into the results. While Kiddle, based in the U.S. and the Netherlands, is a separate and unrelated venture to Google, the system uses the web giant's safe search mode in addition to its own team of human editors to pick out the unsuitable content.
children in western countries are over protected and coddled, and as result, even as adults they have a warped sense of the world; they see moral landscape of the world simplistically, preach 'tolerance' of everything, but feel entitled to a lot, ignore the costs of that entitlement(be it blood or money), etc etc
when those who are paying the costs ( be it victims/instruments of their governments) refuse to pay(voting for 'outsiders' or perhaps resist violently or otherwise), they are branded racists, reactionaries, or terrorists,
of course in the long run those who pay will end up with the upper hand. its a ugly future for the coddled masses in west .
Not sure I'd want my kid using a 'visual search engine' that's a portmanteau of 'kid' and 'diddle'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Internet censorship doesn't work?? Oh, come on! Next you'll be trying to tell us that Ebay is a bunch of crooks.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"patriotism"
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
It's not about sexual preference, it's about relationship preference. Very simple: some men grow up and end up marrying men, and some women grow up and marry other women. No one's asking they be taught about scissoring or anal.
Make another internet just for kids.
Really.
We already have mobile versions of websites. Why not kid versions? Little Billy can go to Samsung.kid and get treated the kid friendly page, instead of blah blah blah about investor relations and global operations etc. If Samsung doesn't want to put in a kid page with cartoons advertising their wares, they can just not have anything at all
Other educational sites can operate at whatever level of maturity the account holder can view.
Don't allow anonymous access. Have registration through the school system. Make it a crime to post content unsuitable for children on it.
I can see this not being ideal when you might start expecting a child to do research into subjects. 11? 12?
But younger than that, I can't see why children would need anything close to unfettered web access.
It still has the pitfalls of stolen identities/credentials being used to view or post inappropriate content.
And how do you handle children posting bad content? That I do not know.
death is a bad word, die is not. mass grave is not, 2 clicks later I am looking at something I don't want to look at. suicide is a bad word, but right to die is okay. Searching for gay or lesbian returns a special message "You have entered an LGBT related search query. Please realize that while Kiddle has nothing against the LGBT community, it's hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such queries. We recommend that you talk to your parent or guardian about such topics." searching for suicide or kill myself just returns the same bad word message. Gun is a bad word, rifle and pistol is not. deep throat is banned, throat deep is not.
Why did they choose a mad looking robot as the mascot?
Parents want it, parents pay for it, so there's a market for it.
In the end, if everything works as it should, parents are happy they did something to protect little Billy from the bad reality out there and little Billy, being far more computer savvy than his parents, easily circumvents it and is happy that he can still have all the content he wants. Plus a company makes money from gullible people.
I.e. internet business as usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Demand to censor all the religious texts. You know, the ones where they stone people to death, and where they nail the good guys to crosses. That's scary for kids! Scarring them for life! Get rid of that filth!
Then let the religious nuts and the SJWs duke it out. I bring the popcorn.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, it does explain it if you search for it:
"You have entered an LGBT related search query. Please realize that while Kiddle has nothing against the LGBT community, it's hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such queries. We recommend that you talk to your parent or guardian about such topics."
Ie, the search term leads to too much porn to be able to filter out.
Me deciding what not to read is not censorship, and the means by which I choose to not read it is not oppressing you. Me helping my children decide what not to read is not bad parenting and using this or any other means at our disposal to be selective about our choices is our business. Calling this censorship is as ludicrous as calling the nyt best sellers list censorship because it's a finite list of all possible books. Get over yourselves.
Since when are sites that require "Adobe Flash" safe for kids when a child can be manipulated into turning on the camera and microphone in the flash settings?
Yeah, I thought it sounded like a shorternym for "Kiddy Fiddle"
I can agree with this, remove the label and have it divided into 'sexually explicit' and not and I have no issues with it, so long as that's the line.
Sadly, I suspect it's really an attempt to filter gay/lesbian relationships from reality, which I do have an issue with.
My kid is being taught in school at gr 2 that some families have 2 mommys and some have 2 daddys, and I have no problem with it. I wouldn't want her to use a search engine that was less open then her school.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Unfortunately that's the exact excuse often used to block the discussion of LGBT issue. The exact claim varies, sometimes it's "it will be too confusing for children" and sometimes it's "we can't separate out the sexual aspects", but it all basically boils down to claiming that because there is effort involved it must be censored. Straight relationships require no effort to describe because they are "normal".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I entered an ambiguous search term: "cute chicks", figuring a child-friendly search engine would probably show me pics of fuzzy baby chickens:
- It's either broken or incredibly slow. I waited...and waited...and waited... What is it, do the editors manually answer every query?
- I went to KidzSearch, which is also powered by Google Safe Search, entered the same term, and there are simply zero results. Zero?
- Enter the same term in Google Safe Search, and the top five results are baby chickens. So the search term works.
Ok, so I was trying to trick them, so let's try something ordinary: "puppies". Still zero results, even though Google Safe Search has zillions. Same result, i.e., nothing happened. I guess it's kid-safe if you never return any results. Boring, but safe...
- - - - -
Update: I tried refreshing the page, with the search term "puppies". This time I got a clear message "looks like your query contained some bad words." Bad puppies, bad! Somebody whack this site with a rolled up newspaper.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
> How do you explain it to your kids when they see two women kiss at a public restaurant.
explain it to the kids? i run over and start stuffing dollar bills down their shirts
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Because there exist a number of very vocal idiots who think their belief in contradictory morals dictated by invisible sky wizard gives them some kind of say in what consenting adults who are not them are allowed to do in private.
Said vocal idiots are really fucking bothered by the idea that other people who aren't like them might be considered equal in the eyes of the law, so they go out of their way to try and come up with special terms to describe the relationships that have not a single fucking thing to do with them. They really need to make sure that "people not like them" aren't allowed to be "married" because somehow that lessens the meaning of their "marriage" despite the fact that "people who are like them" often do a perfectly fine job of making a mockery of "marriage" just fine. Hence the "special label" you seem so puzzled by.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This. We shield our kids from reality and protect them from anything that might be able to make them a better, more balanced, person, then we wonder why they grow up to be intolerant and completely lack and character or backbone.
In reality, by making sure nobody is ever "mean" to our kids, all we do is make them weak and unable to handle the real meanies out in the real world; and by hiding reality from our kids, all we do is force them to explore their urges (be they sexual, criminal, or theological in nature, for example) without guidance, often with dangerous consequences. As for the worry? Any parent who deprives their child of thick skin and a backbone should worry, the first time their kid encounters reality outside the parent's sphere of "safety" they're going to be completely lost.
Now, I'm not saying we should abuse kids (in any sense of the word), but they do need to be exposed to reality. Perhaps not the harsh realities of life, which they'll be better equipped to avoid on their own if exposed to a broader reality, but it isn't harmful to occasionally mess with their sense of reality (and let them work it out for themselves), take their toys from them to teach them why stealing is wrong (e.g. after they've taken something of yours), or even spank them (when the thing they're doing is likely to cause more harm than that if left unchecked). It's not harmful to let them know that they are not, by default, a special snowflake and teach them that becoming such a special snowflake, the kind of person society will remember forever and talk about in history books, takes drive, determination, lots and lots of effort, and a little bit of luck.
Meanwhile, there is clear harm in telling every kid that any effort at all, just simply participating, is worthy of praise and an award; this teaches entitlement, it teaches that you only have to show up and go through the motions to get the reward, you needn't actually do a better job than anyone else, because there are plenty of awards to go around. While that's a nice sentiment and I'm sure we all wish it were actually true, I dare any one of you to try it at work (at your own risk, of course) and let me know how it works out). There is clear harm in shielding kids from the pain of their mistakes, particularly when those mistakes carry considerable risk of inducing their own pain; for example, if your kid runs into traffic once and you tell them not to, they do it again and you tell them more sternly, they do it again and you yell at them, you're doing them a disservice if they don't get a spanking the next time they do it; this is something that can hurt or kill them, it should be a painful experience for them every time it happens, so the stop doing it before they really get hurt.
But no, no reality or behavioral learning for our little special snowflakes. It's like we don't want them to succeed in the world.
Will your kid hate you if you spank them? Yeah, for about 5 seconds. Sure, they won't be happy about it, but they'll get over it (quickly, at that) and, later in life, they'll realize why you did it and be thankful, assuming you reserve that severe of a punishment for instances where they're risking severe injury or death to themselves or others. Will they curse your name when you take their toys? Of course they will! But, again, they'll get over it quickly and, later in life, realize why and be thankful, again assuming you reserve that punishment for instances where they've caused (or very seriously caused risk of) loss or damage to someone else's property through their own knowing action (e.g. they stole or purposely broke something). Those are severe punishments, which should be reserved for severe behaviors; they should not be avoided altogether. We, as a species, learn best from pain and loss.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How much? More than was necessary but my point was proven successfully and with relative quickness so it subsided quickly. I did not, on the other hand, get an apology. I remember it quite well. You could say it was more enlightening than it seems or than it merits.
It should be noted that I later split up and divorced the mother of my kids. After a short while, they both opted to come live with me permanently. I'd like to lie and say it's because I'm such a great father but the truth is that I just had the better toys. They still spent plenty of time with their mother as I was often on the road but I was the primary care giver. The eldest was about 9 at the time and her brother trundled along behind her so we all lived together. That hampered my style but I have no regrets.
As a further point of interest, my daughter doesn't recollect the story but has heard it many times and comments on it fairly often. She claims that it was, even if she doesn't remember it, one of the more influential things in her life. I've since shared this "nugget of wisdom" (aka a Davidism) with her, "I've hit my thumb with a hammer many times but I have never done so on purpose." Between the two, I think I've managed to impart the necessary life-skills to enable her to be happy, healthy, and productive.
The boy-child... Well, he's a good kid. ;-) He's much the same though he's a bit more laid back and introspective. He's curious and a thinker but not overly cautious. They both have trusts but I did not enable them to be useless or unproductive. I sold and thought long and hard about it and they do have managed trusts but they also have control (if they want it) over those trusts. They can not live all that well on those trusts - but they won't starve on them either. I wanted them to be working, productive, and not spoiled. They were kind of old when I sold anyhow, so they weren't all that keen on being spoiled.
The daughter, she never touches her's and saves it up. The boy, well... He's smarter than we give him credit for. He's living like a king in Peru with a very sexy native. He's smart about it and will soon be the proud owner of a small bar/hotel. He's actually managing to save money because the cost of living is so low down there. He went there to collect samples of endangered plants and then have their genome sequenced. He found a lovely young native girl and is now living there and helping her and her mother out. I've only met the mother once, over a few day long visit down there, but I've met his girlfriend a couple of times now and they seem to be good people. So, he might not be as productive as he could be but he's not a leech and he's doing good things.
Which is to say, if you give them room to make errors then they'll learn from them and become better people. I could finance either and let them be entirely useless. I will not do so. I am not even leaving them a whole lot when I die. I don't want monsters for kids and that means that Ii let them experience life and not shelter them. Protect? Sure... However, the line between protecting and sheltering is not so very vague. It's pretty clear. Hell, I didn't even really protect them so much as to give them the tools to dust themselves off and fix things up for the next run.
They tell me I did a fine job. They're probably lying to make me happy but they don't come with man pages so I could only do what I felt was right at the time. They're happy, I'm happy, and that's the most important thing to me - even beyond health. It seems a lot of the lessons that I've learned center around the idea of getting out of the way and letting people make their own choices and then enabling them to reach their goals. In business and in family life, I think that method has served me well.
Ah well... Sorry for the novella but that doesn't easily fit on a bumper sticker nor in a tweet.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."