Slashdot Mirror
Software V-Chip for PC Games?
63N1U5 writes "CBS news is reporting that SMARTGUARD software is releasing a new application that will allow parents to control their children's PC gaming, a-la the V-Chip for television. The new software, called WallFly, uses the ESRB ratings database to determine if a game can be launched by the current PC user, based on the parents' preferences. Parents can also use this software to set limits on when and for how long their children can play PC games."
As long as the porn sites are still easy to access, its all good.
...why don't parents just talk to their kids?
The Custom Mary
even less work for parents!
jeez...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Its called being a parent. Dont let your little kids play M rated games, dont let them sit there for hours at a time. You can install the games to their profile yourself so that they can only play games you allow them to play.
But we cant have that, no-one wants to do their jobs as a parent anymore.
But just wait until some kid goes Columbine because this thing cut off his game before he could save his progress.
8==8 Bones 8==8
As long as it is voluntary (sp?) I'm fine with it. Parents should have the right to take charge of what their rotten little bastards are up to. If it's mandated that all computers have this then I'm against it. But, I don't have any knee-biters in my household.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
the problem with these types of measures is they don't take into account idle time (as in maybe going to the bathroom and leaving it on or pausing for some reason) and also I know from experiance playing 2 hours of a game when you are close to the end or completing an important part and then getting booted off would be discouraging at best.
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
...will allow parents to control their children's PC gaming
Damn.
Dashboard Widgets
Parents could pay attention to their children and not let them buy the game in the first place. Being 17 I can see why parents would just shell out some money for some way to control their kids without having to talk to them, but if parents woudl just sit down and talk, or even better, unplug the box alltogether they coudl save some money.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Gives the parents a little control over what their kids are into and keeps the government's ever pervasive fingers out of it. I for one don't want a village overseeing my kids (well, grandkids now), just the family.
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
It is also a very compelling argument in favor of multi-user systems.
The big catch with this idea, though, is that this is restricted to only commercial titles, and ESRB-rated titles at that. While TFA says that this can also be used to control "computer use," it likely won't be able to distinguish web/Java games from web research for the science fair.
I speculate that the software knows executable names for commercially released games, and it can then cross-reference these against the ESRB database. With this in mind, smaller catches are that this software will require regular updates, and the ESRB rating system itself is quite coarse: look at the dearth of adults-only games.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
If this gets implimented on a wide scale, I think we will see bootable Linux cds with the nvidia kernel and doom3 or halflife2 installed becomming very popular.
I love these kinds of restrictions, they really help kids get creative and find ways around systems of control. It teaches them valuable lessons that they will need later in life as DRM get more and more popular. If we are to live in a free society, we need creative people who can subvert the confinements imposed by parents, churches, governments, and corporations.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Hey same with porn filters...so screw it forget filters all together. It's possible to write software that would be realivitly hard for kids to bypass. The point that worries me most about this is not the fact that kids might get around it...but that parents need it. Where exactly will kids get games that their parents don't want them to play? Even if they get them, shouldn' the parents have taught them better than to play games they disapprove of?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What makes it tick?
...Is self-learning and automatically updated so that existing policies and restrictions will apply to even the newest software without additional administration. ...Is hacker resistant. Attempts to tamper with or disable WallFly will cause an alert to be emailed to the parent. Renaming files or installing new games does not fool WallFly."
.exe file "metadata" matches a blocked title, which would be easy to 'fix'.
"Wallfly:
So it learns by itself what the files are? The ESRB doesn't publish the rating for a given md5sum (and even then, games could be patched with a NOP at the beginning or end, or games that update themselves would evade the checksum).
Unless it checks to see whether the title in the
Just some thoughts... any ideas?
Really nice picture on the product page of a father and son using an Apple iBook...
Shame the software is for Windows.
Personally I would suggest not buying games for a child that are rated above his/her age...
Also how does it stop a kid from playing Flash games in a web browser instead of researching homework...
Or that the kid probabally knows more about the computer than ma or pa.
When you're a hormone driven teenager porn is something that will somehow mysteriously find it's way to you. 2 out of 5 machines that were brought into my shop TODAY were here because of damage to the system. 1 was a 15 year old, the other 16. Both had P2P and "other" items on it. One machine literally had 90gigs of porn! Take about having his stroke material all planned out. Granted, I'm talking about the blockster and not the wallfly, but either is a great thing. it would even be better if they were in a package together since they both are kind of the same overall purpose.
Anyway, both parents were extremely upset as they had BOTH told their kids no P2P network crap but they did it anyway. Of course, if they didn't let them have their computers in their room that might have been a bit different, but what do I know?
Anyway, this is a great idea, in my humble opinion. I receive calls all the time from parents wanting to know how to stop their kids from getting into that kind of crap.
The V-chip is not about protecting the children. It is a surveillance device. This new software version for computers is probably no different.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
kids will attempt to thwart their parents' will just to do so. An expression of their independence.
That said, I don't know what I'd prevent a kid at that age (15-16) from playing. Him playing video games beats the hell out of throwing pumpkins at mailboxes or sucking cock at rest stops. (ok those were really unrealistic examples but I'm stoned)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
My oldest just turned 9.
We monitor his game usage pretty much all the time he is using it, and the computer is set up in such a way that anyone can see what's on the monitor at almost any time, as it is set up in the main living room.
He is only allowed to play games which:
1) I have played.
2) I do not feel is too violent or sexual in nature.
3) Which I feel will not alter his behaviour in an undesirable way.
I feel that #3 can be important. If you do not pay close attention to the way your child acts after they play a video game, the results could surprise you. He was playing what I had at the time thought of as a rather non-violent game - a space conquest game that is basically just a strategy game. There are no characters, no people of any kind in it at all, but it actually seemed to have a detrimental effect on him and he became more violent. Almost as soon as I cut his access off, his attitude and behaviour improved.
At another time, he was playing what I considered to be a graphically violent game, but it did not affect him adversely at all. In fact he ended up identifying with the characters and gaining compassion because of it.
I think that the ESRB ratings are a pretty good system, although they could still use improvement (what couldn't?).
As a parent, I have seriously considered getting the software in TFA, not because of the ratings system that it uses, but because it helps me regulate the amount of time he gets to use it for. It would be very useful to have an objective system by which I can "pay" him for doing his chores by granting him an extra hour a week to play. Trying to monitor his time on the computer is a lot harder without a tool like this.
I have complete control over my home computer, so it's not a matter of access to games, but of access for the TIME to play them. I would much rather punish my son by reducing his weekly allotment of computer play time by 1/2 an hour than standing him in time-out or making him do extra chores.
To me this is a tool to be used to help me parent effectively, not as a substitute for my parenting.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
As a friend to a lot of other parents who don't know the difference between M,T, and E ratings, only the video game makers are to blame for this. The self-regulating ratings are a joke.
/noblood /nosex etc. options (Duke3D, Mortal Combat)?
I don't believe in censorship for video games (government or otherwise). I regulate (censor) what my kids see/do, but thats my right as a parent.
I think another rating system is in order for the clueless who buy eight year old Johnny Doom III because he asks for it.
Whatever happend to
Food for thought,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
Complaining about "lazy parenting" aside, there are always problems with censorship via software. My first experience with the web was in high school, and in my comptuer class one of our assignments was to make a web page. So I started looking for links for stuff I was interested in at the time, like X-Men comics. All the sites I came up with were blocked by the schools net filter. After thinking "wtf? X-Men comics are PG!", I tried an experiment, and typed in www.playboy.com, and hit enter. Boom! Up comes the site with a nice picture of Miss October. So their filter would block comic books fit for 6 year olds, and yet the homepage for the most famous adult magazine in the country was wide open?
Yeah, this was a few years ago, but I have a more recent example: a swearing filter for the game Counter-Strike. The problem? You couldn't say "I had good competition earlier from Japan", because "tit", "lier", and "jap" were filtered. You could, however, say "I just had orgazmic intercourse with a dead baby's skull" and be just fine with the filter. I wonder which statement the server admin would find more offensive.
So now matter how advanced filtering gets, you'll always have examples of stupid things that get blocked or allowed through.
Being 15, I can tell you that if my parents were to install this, I would simply kill it. I'm Admin on my box, so I don't have to worry about profiles. Even if my parents manage to sneak something like this on, and block me from deleting it: how does it stop me from booting into DOS and deleting it there? All my parents need to do is talk, it does a lot more than a lame peice of software could ever hope to do.
A) Why not just not buy them the games?
Because maybe you _didn't_ buy them the games, but they borrowed them from friends, or bought them with their own money; or maybe the games are for you, not for the little tykes;
B) Why, when I was a kid and they tried to do this to me, I hax0red the PC to let me do it anyway! Any average kid will be able to do this in about 5 minutes!
I call bullshit, and would like to see cite. "A person I know did it" is an anecdote. An anecdote is not the singular form of evidence. Sure, some kids will be able to get around this; some kids won't bother and will do something else. It's not like you're betting your life on their inability to hax0r the system.
C) Parents should just pay attention to their kids!
Right. Because the correct answer is for the parent to always watch over the kid's shoulder. That'll help the kid develop well.
Look, I'm not an advocate of this tool, and I wouldn't use it with my kids -- I grew up in a household where my dad's firearms were easily accessible to me with no lock in the way. Instead of hiding them from me, my dad taught me how to use them safely and said "whenever you'd like to shoot them, I'll go with you." Not quite the same thing with porn, but that's because I didn't ask. But some parents would like to do what they can to make it so their kids don't have access to these sorts of games, and while this isn't a panacea (hey Bobby, can I come over and play UberViolence? Thanks!), it can be helpful.
Government will force computer manufacturers to put a V-chip, hardware, in the computer. They already did it with TV's. Why? Because hardware is much more difficult to hack than software. Look at how much more difficult it is to pirate games for the playstation, you need a mod chip, not just a copy of the game. And that costs extra money, and takes time. Plus, if you try and add the chip on your own, you could fry the whole system.
I would also like an alarm system to sound when the kid tries to play a game they are not allowed to play. A nice loud siren. Maybe the monitor can flash red too.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
You know something about GTA:4 the rest of us don't?? Spill it!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I for one welcome our new free lesbian porn troll.
Frankly, as others said, parenting is a lot of hard work. And you must be consistent. As for them doing things other than what they were taught, get real, all kids do things that would curl their parent's hair. The best thing I've done is told the kids that if they abused their net priviledges, I would lock them out of the machine via the bios. And I've done it. I also pointed out that if the case was opened and the password cleared via jumper that the next time they went to used the computer it would have a keylock on it and the next time they used a computer in the house AMD would be marketing 512 bit CPU's
They know I mean it, because I've followed through on everything else I've said. That's the key, them knowing you will follow through, first time, every time. And that's regardless of how much they whine
to be honest with you, i didn't even know it was still around. So this article was a little surprising to me. I'm all for the software, the same way I'm all for the V chip. The people who came up with this and the ones who impliment it feel better about us heathens, and the general public never use them, and forget about the whole thing. Let the system think it's safe, while the rest of us go on with our lives like normal. Hope I explained that well enough.
Most of us should be cheering for this one!
This sort of technology -- software meant to restrict freedoms -- will simply redirect the time the child wants to spend on the computer playing games into time learning how to break through the software.
He'll learn how weak the Windows operating system is for security, perhaps even take a crack at his parent's passwords.
Obviously, once he grows up and realizes as a twelve year old he could break into Windows, he'll make sure to consistently use a flavor of Linux to protect his interests.
All this because he wasn't playing some mindless point and click shoot-em-up game.
Because that's all it will ever be, an illusion.
Kids get around their parents porn-proofing the computers all the time, the number of kids this will stop from playing those games is inconsequential.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because most people don't run an operating system on their home game computer that actually and effectively implements this level of control
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Everytime I see articles like this, there's a plethora of comments along the lines of "Gee, why don't the parents just, I dunno, do some parenting!"
Guess what? This is a form of parenting. Whether it's an effective, or good method of parenting is debatable, but a parent who uses software like this is making an effort at raising their child to be what they consider to be a good moral person. Your opinion of what a good moral person is may differ; and the methods they choose to try to promote their morals may not be as effective as they think, but they are making an effort.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For gawd sakes keep this story away from my wife... I'd hate to get forced into doing laundry or some other helpful chore around the house when I could instead be fraggin' the heck out of some anonymous sucker.
Is it really going to make any kind of difference considering the way that the ESRB rates games i mean things like a 15+ rating for comic mischeif but a rating of 13.5 for medium level animated violence the sysytem makes so little sense why not make it like the ratings are in Australia and New Zealand and base the ratings purley on game content and like violence and gore and what not.
I figured out whats wrong with the world , its other people -Dilbert
On the other hand, you're sitting here saying "god damn", "asshole", and "fuck" casually.
Not saying that it's from the games specifically, but you're not exactly one I would hold up as a good example of what behavior you want to encourage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unless parents use this kind of software /hardware we will not help train the next generation of hackers. :)
If you try to ban this or that kids first reaction is to see what all the fuss is about, instead let them know you're unhappy with their choice of game if you don't approve. As a parent I always try all my kids games ( good excuse to the wife for those 6 hr all- night gaming sessions 'it's for the kids!!!)
I often don't agree with classifications anyway, as the parent my views are much more important than some faceless commitee full of 'special interest' and 'friends' of the great and the good, probably with delinquent kids and several failed relationships anyway.
I believe my kids respect my opinions because I play the games, thus I can steer them towards the games I approve of.
any child with even the tiniest bit of smartness will know about ctrl+alt+delete and how to disable software. some might say that parents would not give the access rights for their child to turn it off, but if the parent knew about access rights in the 1st place, they wouldn't have needed the vchip.
remember back in the good old days when the favorite 2 key combo after ctrl+alt+del was alt+tab? before starting any game, i would open a word document (partially filled in, u dont want to get caught with an empty word document). whenever my parents walked in, a quick alt+tab and it'll look like i'm serious at work.
also, how will this vchip detect flash games. many of the internet games nowadays are programmed in flash.
HD Trailers
It's a nice tool which I'd probably set only to stop games rated Adult, I'd rather my kids don't get exposed to some of the darker parts of society before they have to.
As others have pointed out, it's no fix for proper parenting, though it'd help a lot of parents knew how to use computers.
Whatever as long as this means stupid parent groups will get off the backs of the game developers. Personally i think digital TV standards should come with a more accurate censorship system, since most countries are about to switch over to digital now is the perfect time to get this into the set top boxes people are about to buy - basically the system should be similar to the v-chip except its user-configurable to censor anything from an entire channel to just a program to just a scene or second or two of video or even black out a portion of the screen and the same with audio. Not only that it should be configurable to be either 'censor all except material flagged ok' or 'only censor material flagged adult' this way its totally optional whether tv networks actually encode their programs but they have the incentive to do so because they know there will be lots of people setting it to censor all by default. This would totally solve all censorship and free-speech issues on both sides of the political spectrum forever.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
it's just not realistic anymore to expect to have a parent at home at all the same times as the children
WHAT!?!?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!
It is hard, to be sure, but it is absolutely realistic and possible to have one parent at home when the kids are home
(assuming a two-parent household where there's a good relationship between the parents, and both parents are physically and emotionally healthy - where healthy is defined as behavior within currently acceptable social norms)
This is about life choices, people. You (generally) choose the quality of your relationship with your spouse; you choose where to live, what kind of cars to drive, how much you spend on yourself, and what your priorities are!
Our family of six lives on my income alone. We own a relatively small home, we drive used cars, we shop for bargains - yardsales, freecycle, etc - and we have healthy, well adjusted kids where mom is home with them.
It's my job to earn an income, and then to come home and co-parent my kids. That means after a tough day at the office I come home, take the baby from my wife, and keep the rest of the kids entertained while she finishes preparing dinner. We play as a family together until time for bed when it's my responsibility to share the workload with my wife. I grocery shop after the kids are in bed or I take the kids with me so that she gets some rest.
The point is we CHOSE to live a more fiscally conservative lifestyle so that our kids could have a parent at home. Our income is above 'average' but I am sure that we could do this on an 'average' income. If it was too expensive to live in a metro area, we could move someplace cheaper. It's all a choice.
Almost everyone could choose this, too. There ARE exceptions as noted above. Some of those exceptions could be eliminated. Got a bad marriage? Work on turning it around! Bad health? Most health problems are related to lack of activity and obesity. Perhaps there's a place to start.
Let's avoid some of the knee-jerk responses, while I'm at it. If you have serious illness - HIV/AIDS, Cancer, MS, and a whole host of others, it's going to be MUCH harder to make it work having a parent at home. If you have a drug-addicted or absent partner, having a parent at home is impossible.
Let's talk about the middle of the bell curve, not the extremes. People can make financial and personal sacrifices to provide a present parent. Most are simply too selfish to do so, or they have never thought through the fact that they ARE making choices. With appropriate self-evaluation, and a willingness to do without, most two-parent families could have both parents at home. They just don't.
This is not a lack of realism, but rather a lack of wisdom.
BTW - it IS good parenting to lock away guns, cleaners, prescription medicines, etc. This software helps parents with some kids, by choice, and I consider that a good thing.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?