Sitefinder II, the sequel...

Thu Jul 13 18:33:20 UTC 2006

> On Jul 13, 2006, at 12:19 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
> > I don't really think it is entirely appropriate that a child who is  
> > looking
> > for information on the White House could land somewhere obscene  
> > through
> > entering a web address that appears obvious and logical.
> 
> Who gets to decide that?

If you were reading along, you would have noted that I was using it to
lead into an example of why some sort of "net nanny" DNS service might 
be at least moderately successful, in which case - they would.  I notice
you conveniently clipped all of that out of my note.

There are at least 101 other ways to accomplish the same thing; 
personally, I don't believe in allowing children on the Internet 
unsupervised in the first place(*).  The possible exception to 
supervision might be a carefully constructed whitelist system of
some sort that restricted activities to known-safe sites, which
is what some schools do.

Who knows, there might be a market for such a thing implemented via
DNS.  Apparently you didn't quite get that point, apologies for any
misunderstanding.  I see *significantly* more potential in that sort
of a service offering than I do a mere "SiteFinder" type of service,
but the success or failure of such a service is dependent on whether
or not there are fundamental flaws in the underlying concept of the
OpenDNS strategy.

(*) I'll further note that even strategies such as supervision can
fail when confronted with something like "whitehouse.com."

So, here are some thoughts.

1) A DNS service provider could provide the virtual equivalent of
   "NOGGIN on the Web", listing the Top 1000 kid-safe destinations
   on the Web, and referring any other domain lookups back to the
   search engine, which in turn only lists the Top 1000 kid-safe
   destinations.

2) A DNS service provider could provide the equivalent of Google's
   safe-search, where sites that are known not to be kid-safe, plus
   phishing sites, plus maybe new domain registrations, are instead
   referred to the search engine, which lists most of the rest of
   the Internet.

Both of these assume that it is all right to alter the DNS in a manner
more invasive than what OpenDNS appears to be doing.  Both of them are
in fact models which could potentially generate direct user revenue.

I am not advocating it, I am just contemplating the possibilities.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.