Don Marti

Tue 20 Aug 2013 07:31:32 AM PDT

Virtual cartoon police for the web

Remember this story from Global Voices a while ago?

...the police in China's capital, Beijing, will start patrolling websites registered on Beijing servers using animated police officers that pop up in a user's browser....According to the Associated Press, the cartoon cops can walk, bike or drive across the screen every 30 minutes, warning Internet users to stay away from illegal Internet content and bad websites.

How about we make something similar for sites in the USA?

Some cute NSA characters, and a little tasteful JavaScript and CSS to show one in action on your site every so often, along with a true fact about Internet surveillance here.

Your hosting provider probably just wants to put some lipstick on the pig, wait for the surveillance story to drop out of the headlines, and go back to business as usual. But once you put a JavaScript thingy in a site template, it tends to stay there.

I'll be adding an animation with a placeholder image to this site...any cartoonists out there want to do some sketches?