Miss America Lends Name to Kid-Safe Web Browser | Hacker News Reader

Miss America Lends Name to Kid-Safe Web Browser

foxnews.com

6 pointsgibsonf110 comments

Have any of you gone through all the trouble to download the browser? Not really engendering trust. They want your name and email just to download the software, then they want your name, email, age, phone number (for customer service ?!) they send you the email which went straight to my spam label in gmail and inform me that

"You will be receiving a series of emails offering Internet Safety Tips and other instructions on how to get the most benefits from your new Kid Safe Browser."

Then to register as a parent they ask you for your name, street address email phone and whether you are over 18.

Then they want your childs birthday and your presented with this gem:

I give my permission for my child to receive email from Club Tuki via their e-mail account (without checking this box, you child will not be able to receive Auction Notification emails through our TUKI Moola auction site).

After that they did deliver as promised, I got an animated Miss America (think clippy) that tells me when sites are not on "the master list"

If you want to close the browser you are informed that you have 30 days left on your trial before the premium features expire because it hijacks the close button and makes you read through a pop-up. It also leaves the taskbar up, so any kid smart enough to find start will be able to launch Firefox and surf where ever they want. It also starts at Club Tuki or some such where you can earn Tuki bucks by playing arcade games but I think there's a registration involved there too.

One thing this does the REAL kid friendly browser could clone... it has a banned words list which includes our first and last names so that would be nice (it also has an encouraging words list like "My family loves me!" and a chores list with I'm guessing chore reminder pop-ups, but I don't recommend implementing those features)

She does indeed say "Buh-Bye!" as promised though.

Oh, I should add you can run the browser in the background and get the animated Miss America character to float in front of any other browser. I'll let you know if she tells me anything about kangaroos while I read Hacker News

thanks for doing the research. i didn't have enough tuki moola saved up to test it out for myself today. maybe this weekend. i have to hear ms. america reading me my email, i mean, c'mon.

I read the title and thought maybe pikluk pulled off some amazing PR...

When the "Exit" icon is clicked, Miss America coos, "Buh-BYE!"

LOL. Doesn't sound like it.

Buh-BYE

Haha, I was hoping for the same thing.

Woow. One more competitor for us to deal with. Thank you for the link, gibsonf1!

At this point more competition is good for us since it validates the idea/implementation.

Yes, I would be happy if I were you.

Pikluk: the non-creepy alternative...

that's disturbing on so many levels.

The Fox article talks about protecting kids from "lurid photos", but the first thing I thought when I went to http://www.missamericakids.com/ was, "what, did I click on the right link?"

+10 for PikLuk!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com