On 27 Nov 97 at 13:12, Declan McCullagh wrote:
[I'd still like to hear more on the inner workings of next week's "kids on the Net" summit from our friends at CDT who are sponsoring it. The lineup of speakers includes Janet Reno, Al Gore, and the secretaries of commerce and education. All joining together to Protect the Children! --Declan]
Here is the piece about the CNN show transposed to another, accurately analagous context to show the utter idiocy of what's going on. What's really sad, what's really scary, is how _little_ I actually had to transpose to do this. All I changed were the occurrences of "online," "software," and "Surf." I modified a couple of other related words just to comport with the shift of the metaphor from online to streets/public places. Many paragraphs remain unaltered because they contain none of the key words. For credible transposition, imagine that the "tools" they're discussing are something like a headset, blinders, and body armor that kids can be made to wear while in public to protect them from the realities of public places. Ask yourself how different that would be from the assinine blocking software being discussed in the original interview, and how intelligent is it to presume to think one can mold all public places to be as safe and comfy as the family living room. These people must be on very strong drugs. This is also an indirect statement on the utter superficiality of present day "news" coverage. The original interview _says_ virtually nothing, communicates virtually no facts. It is really just an emotional rallying and back-patting with little discernable in the way of contextual detail. PropagandaMongerII ----------
HEADLINE: Kids & Public Streets
JOHN DEFTERIOS, CNNfn ANCHOR, ASPHALT JAM: Next week family advocates, educators and industry leaders are coming together to discuss ways to keep children safe on public streets. One of the sponsors of the Streets Summit is Curbwatch, a company that makes blocking tools to help parents and teachers filter out objectionable street content.
Joining me now from Stanford, California to discuss the goals of the summit is Michael Sears. He is the president of Curbwatch. Michael it's great to have you on ASPHALT JAM. Welcome to you.
MICHAEL SEARS, PRESIDENT, CURBWATCH: Thank you, a pleasure to be here.
DEFTERIOS: First of all, let's discuss how this summit came about. Was it a building movement that finally crescendo.
SEARS: I think it is. It's actually the outgrowth of what we did last June with President Clinton and Vice President Gore. In fact June and July time frame the SDA (Streets Decency Act) was overturned. The White House decided to take the initiative and asked the industry to get together to see what we can do to actually empower kids and enable kids on the streets.
DEFTERIOS OK. What is the happy medium here, Michael because that's what everybody is really looking for because the Street Decency Act did stumble and we had people on both side of the debate wanting to stake out their territory. What is , in your view, is the center ground?
SEARS: Well, the debate will continue, but the center ground really is that it's all about kids. What we're talking about doing here is bringing together industry and law enforcement and public policy people and talking about to empower kids on streets and give them effective tools. Effective tools that are also very easy to use.
The idea behind that is how can kids actually get onto the streets, learn, research, discover, play and do it in a really enriching environment. But also we realize that there are a lot of safety concerns in public places. That's probably what we're going to talk about primarily.
DEFTERIOS: How about the ACLU, they were raising concerns about being blocked out here or filtration or censorship on the extreme. How do you deal with that side of - the people on that side of the debate?
SEARS: It's a slippery slope. The idea here is do we block, companies like Curbwatch, do we block content in public places. The idea once again is we target your typical 12 year old in the US. If that 12 year old should see something or if that 12 years old needs to discover something we try to make sure that we have all of our technology, all of our processes in place to insure that information comes forward. Such as, we don't block the idea of breast, for instance, because breast could be talking about a chicken recipe. It could be talk about breast cancer. However, if it's a sexually explicit depiction or expression of that word that's where you come in and use filtering tools to block.
DEFTERIOS: There's another side to this, of course, that kids are often much more street savvy than their parents. How do you over that hurdle?
SEARS: That's a major hurdle. In fact we're talking about empowering kids with effective tools, but those tools have to be very easy to use and the ease of use isn't really for the kids because the kids know how to do this stuff. They know what's on the streets. They know what's out there and they know how to get there. What we really provide are the easy to use tools for mom and dad. So mom and dad pointing and clicking and turning switches on and off very easily can really control the family's environment.
DEFTERIOS: As you know, this is a political hot potato for President Clinton because he didn't want to seem extreme on both side and he would like industry to work it out. When it is all said and done, Michael, what is the solution here?
SEARS: Well, the solution that this market is all about is called parental control. Curbwatch started the market about three years ago and the word parental control itself was important not only because it's the technology, but because of those first two words, parental control. Mom and dad have to be involved. Mom and dad have to engage not only to help the kids in public places, but also make sure that in street conversations or with graffiti or with explicit pictures they can really sit down and talk to the kids and moderate what their kids are doing. We're just a tool.
DEFTERIOS: This is not a government. Not to interrupt you, but we're almost out of time here. But this is, you're saying, not government intervention then.
SEARS: Absolutely.
DEFTERIOS: The technology is out there to let the families tackle this on their own.
SEARS: That on and off switch should be in the hands of moms and dads not the government.
DEFTERIOS: OK, great. How about your market share before we let you go tonight? How are you faring against your competition?
SEARS: I think we're doing very well. All the buzz that's been happening over the last couple of months has helped our shares as well as our competitors. We've shipped millions of copies, 7.2 last July. We haven't done the survey lately, but we're clearly in the tens of millions right now.
DEFTERIOS: OK. It's great to have you.
SEARS: Great to be here. Thanks very much.
DEFTERIOS: And have a nice Thanksgiving holiday.
SEARS: Same to you. Take care.
DEFTERIOS: My pleasure. Michael Sears, president of Curbwatch, joining us from Stanford, California.