Pitara.com launches anti-porn software

The company will begin by giving the software free to schools, libraries, ISPs, and is currently looking at tie-ups with international and national websites, and ISPs

Sabil Francis

agencyfaqs!

NEW DELHI, November 14

Visit the site www.whitehouse.com. A porn site!! Go to www.whitehouse.org. Oops! More porn!!! And worse, it has a link to www.bondage.com!!

Now imagine kids curious about the US elections, visiting these sites. Or typing out "teens" in a search engine, and then seeing God knows what! That's what www.pitara.com is trying to prevent with its new browser Krowser, which stands for Kid's Browser.

Says Ajay Jaiman, founder and CEO, pitara.com, "Children need not seek out porn to find it on the net. Even innocuous words like "teens", when typed out on search engines, can lead to porn sites. What is worrying about the net is its vastness and its anonymity."

Launched by the Pitara Kids Network Limited, the company claims that it is the first browser of its kind in India. Initially, the browser will be given free, but, later on, the more advanced versions of the browser may be sold. What is certain, however, is that the Krowser will certainly attract more eyeballs to the site, which currently gets 10 million hits and one million page views per month.

The company will begin by giving the software free to schools, libraries, ISPs, and is currently looking at tie-ups with international and national websites, and ISPs. Though company officials did confirm that talks were going on, they were reluctant to reveal names.

Krowser, which is aimed at pre-teens, works like this. Sites on the Internet are divided into three categories, green, (URL addresses that have been approved by human editors at Pitara.com), orange (URL addresses that are pending approval) and red, those that are on the "known offenders" list. The databanks are constantly upgraded. Currently, the green databank has 18,000 sites in its green bank, 78,000 in its orange one, and 3,500 sites in its red one. In addition to porn, Krowser also filters out sites that feature violence, hate or crime.

The company aims at having a green database of one million by the end of 2001. Nothing on the red data base can be accessed through Krowser, and orange sites have to be seen by the Krowser team before children can access them.

What makes the Krowser different is that it involves a human interface. Thus, for example, sites featuring the English city of Middlesex can be accessed through Krowser, but editors can monitor chat rooms to ensure that paedophiles do not contact kids.

The Krowser was born as traditional methods of policing the net leave a lot to be desired. Banning the net is impossible, government regulation has run into rough weather; filtering site software can be easily bypassed and personally supervising net access by children is not very easy. These are the reasons why Pitara went ahead with Krowser. Says Jaiman, "The net is here to stay. There may be a problem, but we have to get over it."

And then there is active opposition by vested interest groups. Market research in the United States and in the West, where pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry, showed that porn companies hired programmers to disable anti-porn systems which blocked or filtered pornsites. Outright banning of porn sites or any attempt to police the net is an idea that has been bitterly attacked by civil rights activists in the West, who argue that any attempt to regulate the net is a violation of the fundamental right of free expression.

For example, America Online, the Motion Picture Association of America, and Microsoft have lobbied House members against the Child Online Protection Act (COPLA), which would require all web sites to verify an adult's age before allowing them to view pornographic material or other material deemed "harmful to minors." The Touchstone and Miramax subsidiaries of Walt Disney market racy R-rated films that include intense violence and strong sexual content. Disney is worried that such films could not be marketed online if COPLA becomes law. In another blow, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Internet indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act last year.

A survey by the US-based Digital Research Online found that up to 66 per cent of parents favoured some kind of safety measures on the net. A survey by Horizon Media Research, in 1999, found that in the US nearly 45 per cent of homes with children in the ages 12 to 17 had internet access, and many of them buy or access products online.

Pitara believes that as internet usage mounts in the country, Indian parents too are going to wish that their kids had a guardian as they surf in cyberspace. That's the idea behind Krowser.

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