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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47996-2003May28.html?nav=hptop_tb
Safety Patrol Readied for Dot-Kids
Two Washington-Area Firms Team Up To Stave off Porn, Other Inappropriate Material
By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2003; 8:00 AM
Children will soon have an Internet neighborhood of their own, designed to be free of pornography, hate speech, gambling, discount tobacco sales and other content deemed inappropriate for young audiences.
But the company charged with operating the new kid-friendly domain faces a daunting technological challenge to keep it "G"-rated.
Starting in September, Web site operators who want to run sites for children will be able to buy special "kids.us" addresses carved out within the United States's existing dot-us domain, such as washingtonpost.kids.us.
Before they can establish a dot-kids Web site, buyers will have to show that their content follows rigid guidelines. They'll also be barred from linking to sites outside of kids.us, and will have to obey a federal law that requires them to get parental consent before asking children under 13 years old for personal information.
Washington, D.C.-based NeuStar Inc., which owns the government contract to operate dot-us, plans to use a combination of technology and human supervision to patrol the kids.us space. The company has enlisted Arlington, Va.-based Cyveillance to perform routine scans of kids.us addresses using its "spidering" technology. Cyveillance will flag questionable material and send it to NeuStar for review. Depending on how badly the material violates the rules, NeuStar either will shut down the offending site immediately or give operators a few hours to remove the material on their own.
Spidering technology typically is used by companies to conduct deep searches of the Internet, approaching the task in a much different way than consumer-oriented search engines like Google. NeuStar is the first company to use the approach to patrol a single domain, but other corporations are beginning to use spidering tools to police their large Web sites.
Even the most advanced spidering technology has limited ability to distinguish content appropriate for children from pornography or other adult content.
"Sooner or later the nipples are going to start falling through the cracks," said Ross Rader, director of innovation and research for Toronto-based Tucows Inc., one of the world's largest domain name retailers.
NeuStar employees could be forced to make thousands of decisions that can't be left to a computer, said Ram Mohan, chief technical officer for Dublin-based Internet addressing firm Afilias LLC and a former spider software developer.
"There is no automated way to differentiate between a glazed doughnut and a suntanned breast," he said.
Cyveillance's Paul Burden conceded that spider technology would be hard pressed to distinguish innocuous images from photos deemed innapropriate under kids.us policies, but he said that Cyveillance crawlers rely on other written data and file characteristics to identify targeted material.
NeuStar and Cyveillance employees will vet any material flagged by the automatic scans, Burden added. While that could mean a lot of work for NeuStar and Cyveillance, Burden said that the company will refine its search criteria and streamline its reviews as more kids.us domain names are sold.
NeuStar hopes that the high price of kids-us domain names will make them less likely to be abused. To foot the bill for site surveillance, NeuStar will charge an annual $250 content review fee for each kids.us address. The company also has set the wholesale price of a kids.us domain at $65 a year, more than 10 times the $6 wholesale cost of a dot-com address.
Operators who have their sites taken down for content violations will have to pay $400 to get back online.
NeuStar Director of Business Development Melinda Clem said the kids.us prices create "thin, basically nonexistent margins" for the company but should be sufficient to cover the cost of policing the space.
NeuStar is not making hard predictions about how many people or companies will register dot-kids addresses, but Clem expects registrations to number in the thousands.
Tucows's Rader said his company has not decided yet whether it will sell kids.us addresses, but said that he has so far seen "zero demand from our channel partners."
Safety Patrol Readied for Dot-Kids
Two Washington-Area Firms Team Up To Stave off Porn, Other Inappropriate Material
By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2003; 8:00 AM
Children will soon have an Internet neighborhood of their own, designed to be free of pornography, hate speech, gambling, discount tobacco sales and other content deemed inappropriate for young audiences.
But the company charged with operating the new kid-friendly domain faces a daunting technological challenge to keep it "G"-rated.
Starting in September, Web site operators who want to run sites for children will be able to buy special "kids.us" addresses carved out within the United States's existing dot-us domain, such as washingtonpost.kids.us.
Before they can establish a dot-kids Web site, buyers will have to show that their content follows rigid guidelines. They'll also be barred from linking to sites outside of kids.us, and will have to obey a federal law that requires them to get parental consent before asking children under 13 years old for personal information.
Washington, D.C.-based NeuStar Inc., which owns the government contract to operate dot-us, plans to use a combination of technology and human supervision to patrol the kids.us space. The company has enlisted Arlington, Va.-based Cyveillance to perform routine scans of kids.us addresses using its "spidering" technology. Cyveillance will flag questionable material and send it to NeuStar for review. Depending on how badly the material violates the rules, NeuStar either will shut down the offending site immediately or give operators a few hours to remove the material on their own.
Spidering technology typically is used by companies to conduct deep searches of the Internet, approaching the task in a much different way than consumer-oriented search engines like Google. NeuStar is the first company to use the approach to patrol a single domain, but other corporations are beginning to use spidering tools to police their large Web sites.
Even the most advanced spidering technology has limited ability to distinguish content appropriate for children from pornography or other adult content.
"Sooner or later the nipples are going to start falling through the cracks," said Ross Rader, director of innovation and research for Toronto-based Tucows Inc., one of the world's largest domain name retailers.
NeuStar employees could be forced to make thousands of decisions that can't be left to a computer, said Ram Mohan, chief technical officer for Dublin-based Internet addressing firm Afilias LLC and a former spider software developer.
"There is no automated way to differentiate between a glazed doughnut and a suntanned breast," he said.
Cyveillance's Paul Burden conceded that spider technology would be hard pressed to distinguish innocuous images from photos deemed innapropriate under kids.us policies, but he said that Cyveillance crawlers rely on other written data and file characteristics to identify targeted material.
NeuStar and Cyveillance employees will vet any material flagged by the automatic scans, Burden added. While that could mean a lot of work for NeuStar and Cyveillance, Burden said that the company will refine its search criteria and streamline its reviews as more kids.us domain names are sold.
NeuStar hopes that the high price of kids-us domain names will make them less likely to be abused. To foot the bill for site surveillance, NeuStar will charge an annual $250 content review fee for each kids.us address. The company also has set the wholesale price of a kids.us domain at $65 a year, more than 10 times the $6 wholesale cost of a dot-com address.
Operators who have their sites taken down for content violations will have to pay $400 to get back online.
NeuStar Director of Business Development Melinda Clem said the kids.us prices create "thin, basically nonexistent margins" for the company but should be sufficient to cover the cost of policing the space.
NeuStar is not making hard predictions about how many people or companies will register dot-kids addresses, but Clem expects registrations to number in the thousands.
Tucows's Rader said his company has not decided yet whether it will sell kids.us addresses, but said that he has so far seen "zero demand from our channel partners."
