Software that gives parents password-control over a child's access to Newsgroups has been accused of falling short of its goal to protect kids from the more sinister side of cyberspace.
"It's more about minimising cost than anything else," Irene Graham, executive director of Electronic Frontiers Australia, said of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) Oz Insight software. "It's certainly not a product that's designed to help protect kids."
Oz Insight is designed for Usenet, an interface of over 35,000 Newsgroups which about 25 million Internet users access.
Packaged to appeal to ISPs, the Oz Insight suite includes an advanced Usenet server and an extended NTTP protocol that allows the software to download files more quickly.
"Running the Oz Insight server prevents ISPs storing multiple copies of large images and sound files," a spokesperson from CSIRO said. Thus making multimedia-rich Newsgroups cheaper for ISPs to run.
CSIRO boasts that the software provides savings in bandwidth requirements of up to 30 percent for ISPs hosting Newsgroups.
On the client side, CSIRO claims Oz Insight creates a more user-friendly interface to newsgroups, including the ability to preview multimedia objects before download thus reducing the time is takes users to download large multimedia objects based only on their description.
"What it seems to be saying is that it will make it easier to access Usenet," Graham said. "It makes downloading and decoding easier at the user end of things."
Oz Insight is being launched to the international market this week but it will be a few months or more before it is available to the Australian market.
"We're busy drumming up interest from the ISP community at the minute," the CSIRO spokesperson said.
Showcased at the Melbourne ISPCon conference in August, CSIRO claims "a lot of ISPs were saying it would really help them".
"It would have to be mighty good for ISPs to go with it," Graham said. "We're getting into proprietary software. A lot of ISPs have a favour for programs where the source code is not proprietary," Graham added.
The question of how well it's picked up by ISPs depends on how much it saves on bandwidth downloading, according to Graham.
"I can't see it's going to achieve anything in helping parents protect children," she added.
