ego.istic.org

I'm sure my readers are among the digital haves, the all-connected, up-to-the-minute, 24-hour rolling, 21st century net-set; so I'm sure you will have already heard that it is Internet Safety Day among the European member organisations of Insafe, one of whom is our Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, an agency of the police.

The name of the agency is somewhat unfortunate: the usual semantics of X Centre would make it the Centre for Child Exploitation and for Online Protection, which is, I hope, a misleading description. CEOP (as they like to be called, presumably because CEOPC is unpronounceable) offers its consumer services under the brand name Thinkuknow. The Thinkuknow site is divided into sections by consumer group: children aged 5–7, 8–10, 11–16; parents, and teachers (and people isomorphic to teachers).

The section for parents is surprisingly well-written without going as far as being actually well-written, though the most notable thing about it is the flagrant violations of the GNU FDL, about which a single-paragraph aside.

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license intended for manuals and other books. “Copyleft” means that it isn't just a free license, allowing free distribution of the work and creation of derivative works: it is stronger, attempting to stop people using FDL-covered works to create non-free derivatives. Thus, any derivative of an FDL work be also covered by FDL. Wikipedia is covered by FDL, and so if you paste all or part of a Wikipedia article into your website, you have to license the edited text under the FDL and carry a copy of the FDL on the site. (Arguably, you have to place your whole site under FDL, because the site as a whole is now a derivative of the pasted text, but IANAL.) Thinkuknow does not do this.

In this case, pasting from Wikipedia is a bad plan for other reasons than copyright: the text is completely irrelevant in places. For example, the page about mobile phones really needn't explain that mobile phones use radio waves, nor the difference between cellphones and satellite phones. In giving all this superfluous information, they manage to miss some of the crucial parts. The page explaining the risks of online gaming mentions that it's a good idea to keep the computer in a family room so parents can check that games are age-appropriate, and covers the risk of addiction, but completely neglects two (IMO more) important topics.

The first is that most games these days have social networking features rivalling any more specialised software. The online gaming services I'm on have more buddy and friend lists between them than the instant messaging software, and I have profile pages and game statistics trackers. I know that many of the teenagers of today use World of Warcraft as a Facebook replacement, arranging to meet their offline friends in the virtual world, taking advantage of the freedom to move around and meet people that they are denied in the real world. This means that all the caveats of chat systems and social networking sites put together also apply to online gaming services. Whereas the games console was once the natural haven for the socially inept, it has reinvented itself as a medium for human-to-human interaction.

The second crucial point is one we have seen before. As we all know, some large fraction that is more than half of gamers are adults, and some of us behave as if all gamers were adults. Swearing is commonplace, and tempers can get quite heated when people forget that it's just a game. When I start Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the title screen bears an ESRB notice to the effect that “Game experience may change during online play”: a notice so intrusive that I am starting to think of people who complain about health warnings on cigarettes as whiners. But this notice is a waste of time, because the parents who wouldn't have thought of supervising their children's online gaming won't see it anyway. This is the crucial piece of information about online gaming that should be in big letters on the Thinkuknow site. How old would your children have to be before you'd let them join the darts league in your local pub? Think about the other darts players. They may be mostly harmless, but there's one who's a bit free with his hands, and they pepper their speech with language not fit for mixed company. Now, after thinking of your answer, perhaps you'd like to think about what games your children play online, and with whom.

While I was there, I wandered over to the 11–16 area as well, to take a peek at that. They did a good job at making it visually very different from the site for parnts, but the blatant paste-ins have been carried over: this time the victim is Dell. I'm sure I've seen the same list elsewhere, maybe on the Microsoft website, but I can't find it now. Perhaps if they'd troubled themselves to find someone who knows about online gaming and got them to write the list, they'd have ended up with one slightly less World-of-Warcraft-specific.

Much of the content is the same as in the section for parents, just edited for tone: replacing “because” with “cos” throughout, for instance. I'm not qualified to judge whether they manage to do it without being intensely patronising, but I'll close with two examples: on the mobiles page, they describe a trojan as “a malicious and horrid application…”, and on the instant messaging page, which you have to see to believe the outrageous overexclamation, a Flash animation asking “do u really know every1 in ur buddy list?” jostles uncomfortably with the adjacent link text, “Find out how to take control of issues that may affect you whilst you use IM.”