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Warchalking, for those who missed out on the excitement, is the set of mystical symbols initially created by British Web guru Matt Jones, for marking where open wireless networks are for passing 802.11b users. Not only did Warchalking make it into The New York Times, but it focused the attention of governments on to open wireless networks, with some august bodies denouncing it a danger to the fabric of society. This was, of course, nonsense, and happily that furore has died down.

More seriously, media attention on the dangers of predatory paedophiles on the Internet has prompted the US government to propose an entire new top-level domain that will be 'kids safe'. The idea of having a ring-fenced part of the Internet where kids are safe and bad things never happen is the computing equivalent of living in a gated community and assuming you'll never get mugged. Yet that's the principle behind the creation of the .kids.us domain, in a plan proposed by the US federal government.

The lack of features like chat rooms and instant messaging

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services mean that sites in this domain space will be unattractive to exactly the audience that it is trying to draw. Children, even more than adults, love the chatting and social aspects of using the Internet, so any service that doesn't provide these is unlikely to be of interest to them.

The plan, despite its good intentions, is typical of the kind of half-baked measure intended to protect children that in fact does nothing of the sort. Unless you manage to prevent children accessing every other part of the Internet, it won't work. You might be able to limit Web access on a single machine, but kids will always find another computer to use, unfettered.

Technology is also changing so rapidly that measures designed by governments to prevent children meeting strangers on the Internet are unlikely to work. Consider how phones will change over the next couple of years. As they get more like computers, instant messaging and chat rooms will come to them as well. Short of monitoring every conversation, there will be little that society can do technically to prevent misuse of the Internet.

Rather than control every technology, the answer lies in education. The best way to prevent children from falling into the hands of paedophiles is to teach them what is and is not acceptable behaviour from adults, to help them understand that the world can be a dangerous place and to show them how to explore it without exposing themselves to dire risk.

Have we, as a society, become so addicted to the notion of innocent children not being exposed to any risk that we will fail to arm them with the knowledge they need to survive?