Ukrainian parental controls got top spot

To mark the fifth-annual Safer Internet Day today, the European Union unveiled a three-year study it sponsored of parental controls software and services. In the study, the big-name brands in the US "were all beaten to the top spot by a small partnership that employs no more than 50 people, mostly designers and developers in Ukraine," the BBC reports. The partners who created Magic Desktop, a "walled garden" approach to online child protection, are a couple of fathers who developed it for their own kids. It's basically useful for children 10 and under because it's based on a "white list" of approved children's sites. The rest of the top 10 products are listed in a sidebar to the BBC piece. Here's the official Safer Internet Day site and more from the BBC on Safer Internet Day, in which 50 countries were expected participate this year. For its part, Ireland launched a national online-safety-education program for teachers, parents, and children, the Irish Times reports.