So if everything goes according to plan Zeitgeist engine could be included as an optional module with the GNOME 2.28 release to enhance the Shell experience thanks to Siegfried Gevatter(RainCT).
If it is so then I will also rework some of the Parental Control concepts I presented during GCDS! I see it as a very good marketing point (not for hackers).
The concept is simple: Parental Control subscribes to events from Zeitgeist. Since we deliver the source (Application) as well as the subject (Document, Website, Video, etc…), we trigger some keyword extractor as well as metadata extractor on the subject looking for specific strings that we have in a blacklist. If found in the blacklist we freeze source application and ask for password! If password is wrong then kill the application or do whatever (we can set a dialog box or scripts that could be executed). Tracker could be used in this application!
The application should be simple and not really fancy schmancy as on UI wise… If you like the idea please contact the Zeitgeist team so we can work on it!
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This concept sounds great. As someone who has to oversee kids suing pc’s, I’d request you to please go ahead with this.
This would be fantastic for OLPC! that has always been one of my biggest concernes about deploying these laptops. Kids will be kids so we need to make sure they are not accessing non age-appropriate content on their laptops…
is this really in gnome’s domain?
This perpetrates the myth that a blacklist of “bad words” is a working method for “parental controls”. Residents of, say, Scunthorpe probably disagree. Or people discussing breastfeeding, or having pricks in their fingers.
If you’re serious about parental controls, do it right. (You’d be the first to do that, anyway.)
@jay: What does that have to do with anything? Seif is talking about a stand alone app/daemon that monitors Zeitgeist events. Whether or not Gnome wants this feature can be discussed, but it is a fact that it is a distro-requested feature.
@Lars: Will your kids be discussing breastfeeding? – this is not a “Wife Control” ;-P And a full blown heuristic content analyzer is very hard to do – especially if it is to be light weight. The ones I know of a very taxing on the system (fx. Gate). So the choice is between *maybe* delivering a “correct” prototype in ~2 years (with the current man power) or a prototype that works for 95% of use cases in 2 weeks (and then iteratively improve on that of course). Perfect is the enemy of good.
@Mikkel, you claim a 95% solution. I claim 100% failure on anything based on a list of “bad words”. The history of web filters is full of examples where perfectly innocent sites get censored, while letting through all sorts of filth. And that is more harmful to children (and adults) than being subjected to a restrictive, hypocritical standard of what they can and cannot see.
@Lars Wirzenius
Well we will also use the zeitgeist magic where we try to find out what was used before that to make sure if it is good or bad!
It sounds more or less okay, but parental control should go further than that. E.g. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2258.html lists more use cases.
@Lars Wirzenius Parental control is tricky indeed. That’s why I would not count on getting it right from the get go. Do small simple tests until there’s a better understanding.
@Lars Wirzenius
I totaly agree with You. This should be a system with “smart” analyzing capabilities, maybe some kind of artificial inteligence, which would recognize bad content and block it.
Blocking the entire application where a bad word is generated is not a good idea. How to force someone’s IM client freeze? Send him/her an IM with a bad word!
If a quick hack parental control is desired that only wants to tackle a word list (which is what this idea sound to me), hacking pango probably works better.
Interesting feature, already saw you demo it at GUADEC.
I think it would be nice if you could add support for whitelist kind of blocking as well, because blacklisting doesn’t work properly a lot of the time (not blocking or blocking incorrect things).
@Hylke
Agree! Markus Korn also suggested a white list!
I’m also working on a parental control solution (GPL), for linux and windows, called Kidux. We don’t work with DBus, but it would be simple to do it. We have a local daemon that collects user data (browser, im, etc) and sends it to a server for processing. Let me know if we could work together. My email is leandro (at) kidux.net
Parental control based on the operating system is farcical, it can easily be bypassed by children who often times are more computer literate than parents, in the home no child that need such protection should be left on a computer for any long time, in a school environment an administrator should do the bulk of the work via the router or a service like OpenDns. do not follow the rest with this nonsense. it is just a marketing ploy.
Hello, I also like the Toy Story movies, super animation!
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