UK outfit Crisp promising enhanced online protection for kids

[Bob Crabtree]

It's a fact that the internet is causing big worries for parents concerned that their young children are being bullied on line and might be being groomed by perves wanting to lure them into meeting up. Or should be.

What can be done about the problems is less clear but UK-based outfit Crisp Thinking claims it's got two solutions - the Child Protection Gateway and the Anti-Grooming Engine - that can make a significant difference, if not guarantee to make kids totally secure, and also give internet service providers (ISPs) a competitive edge.

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[DeSean]

Sounds like spying on your kids because you can't be arsed to look after them properly.

I hate this kind of thing, either it blocks things that young people should be able to legitimately use, or it spys on them and reports to parents. I hope this company simply wakes people up to the dangers.

As long as young people know the dangers and parents check up on them from time to time then there will be no need for this big-brother style crud. I hope that kids are careful but that they get round this company's efforts using similar techniques as Chinese internet users.

[chrestomanci]

The idea of having lots of seperate Hurestics that contribute to assess the likelyhood that a particular conversation is OK or not sounds similar to the way spamassain works. For that reason I expect it will work fairly well, but with two major caveats.

Firstly it will only work with supported IM tools that don't use encypted connections. What is to stop a someone telling the kid he is grooming that they need to use a different tool because it is 'cooler' or because of the features it supports. For example Skype supports instant text messaging, but all communications are encypted.

Secondly, like spamassain, over time people will learn how to beat it.

[UltraMagnus]

this sort of thing is stupid, they dont work, and kids tend to know more about computers than the type of parent that installs this **** does! encrypted connections, other clients/protocols, or just booting into safe mode and uninstalling it will all get around this sort of thing easily.

as has been said, its just useless crap that give people that cant be arsed to look after their kids properly a false sense of security

[chrestomanci]

I don't think kids trying to get round the technology will be the problem. My understanding is that this is supposed to work like a virus scanner, silently monitoring conversations in the background, and issuing an alert if their is a risk.

It is not like conventional filtering software that blocks access all the interesting web sites, so I don't think there will be as much incentive for kids to get round it.

While I am sure many kids would like to visit web sites with sex or violence that their parents might not be happy with, I don't think any would like the attention of a paedophile, so I don't think they will deliberately circumvent the protection tools.