Restrictions On Social Sites Proposed In Georgia

A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as MySpace and Facebook, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting: "[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both." The recently offered MySpace parental tools fall short of the bill's requirements. This coverage from the Athens Banner-Herald quotes Facebook's CPO saying that federal law forbids the company to allow anyone but the account creator to access it..

Comments

Perfectly Noxious

[mfh]

And when the parents give their permission -- OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I wish i could mod you up, you brilliant son of a bitch. Bingo.

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[Anonymous Coward]

Come now, this is a serious problem being addressed. Children socializing? And online, no less! Good God, what is the world coming to?

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[Anonymous Coward]

God, as a Georgian, I'm sorry, I'm so very, very sorry.

For this, for Cobb County's school board, for our trog politicians, for our Republi-mono-culture, for a million billion mine's-bigger-than-your's SUVs, for schools in a race for the bottom with Mississippi, for lingere modelling shops, for breast augmentation, for drive-through-vasectomy, the lot.

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[OnlineAlias]

"..for drive-through-vasectomy...."

Wait, don't apologize for trying to fix the problem...

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[Da_Weasel]

I'm a product of said Cobb County school system. It wasn't so bad until when I was there (80-92). I think the area sort of yuppied up a bit after the Olympics came to Atlanta. Went I went back to visit a couple of years ago I didn't recognize anything except the Big Chicken...lol

Re:Perfectly Noxious

[Anonymous Coward]

You havent' driven on I75. The billboards are rather large and obnoxious.

people or property

[Anonymous Coward]

This demonstrates the battle between two competing and mutually exclusive legal approaches to minors: 1) as citizens with the same rights as any other, and 2) as the property of their parents.

Re:people or property

[sumdumass]

As long as the person responsible for their actions are the parrents, then I don't see them giving up their property any time soon.

If the state asumes liability for everything then let them be equal citizens with all the freedoms that the state currently claims they aren't able to process untill they reach a certain age. Usualy 18. And we can have five year old voting with ten year olds buying alcohol and such. I doubt anything like that would ever happen but if they aren't old enough to make certain decisions for themselves then wouldn't monitoring their other decisions be somewhat neccesary? Wouldn't that by default mean parrents should be able to override their decisions?

Re:people or property

[gfxguy]

Such is the life of a slashdotting parent. When a predator victimizes a child, the parents get blamed for not better protecting their children. When a parent uses parental controls (because we cannot monitor our kids 24 hours a day) we get blamed for taking away their "rights."

Well, as a parent I'm legally responsible for my kids, so NO, they DON'T have the same rights as adults. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Re:people or property

[kfg]

You forgot the third one, which is the one that actually holds legal sway at the moment:

3) as the property of the State

KFG

Re:people or property

[KKlaus]

Well you may not be able to monitor them all the time, but they have brains of their own so you can hopefully teach them so that you don't need to. I'm young enough to have been a minor on "the internets" and as long as you aren't ultimately meeting someone in person, its about as safe as you can get. I mean you're in your damn house for chrissake. All of that internet related paranoia comes from watching to much scaremongering news. Teach your kids not to meet strangers out doors (the don't get into any vans for candy lesson), and it'll be fine. If your real fear is that they might lose some of their innocense become you can't control what they see, then that's a different issue entirely. But there are hardly any real safety issues.

And careful what rights you take away. Few would argue with limiting access to (say) firearms or tobacco, but sheltering your kids so they don't grow up faster than you want them to can be unhealthy. Unless they're really too stupid to make the right decision even after you explain it to them, don't just invoke authority and tell them too damn bad on what they want to do or see. Makes them bad citizens when they grow up and the govment does the same thing.

Re:people or property

[dirtsurfer]

So, which part about raising your kids is so hard that you need the government to do it for you instead? Just asking.

Re:people or property

[w1ll0w]

That would be nice if every kid would learn from others mistakes but that's just not the case. I have watched as I told my daughter not to do something and why only to watcher her do it anyway and get hurt. My daughters not dumb, just stubborn. I have a chipped tooth that I won't let the dentists completely fix all the way to remind me of a time I thought my mother didn't know what she was talking about. It's a reminder that I should listen to my elders. And how often do/did you listen to your parents, granted this is a much bigger thing and should probably be avoided but kids make mistakes. That's the whole point of childhood, the only problem is now there's a lot more snakes and fire out there for kids to get hurt by. It's a much more different situation than the not so distant past.

Re:people or property

[gfxguy]

None. If you'd bother reading the AC I was responding too, it had nothing to do with this actual proposal. He was asking if we treat the kids like "citizens" with all the freedoms of everyone else, or like property. While I'm legally responsible, they DO NOT have the same rights as adults.

I agree with him on the level that they should be doing more to catch the predators and less to incovenience the victims, but sometimes that's just not practical.

You'd get on my case if I complained someone stole my cell phone out of my car when I didn't lock it. You'd get on my case if someone stole my TV when I didn't bother closing the doors on my house. You'd get on my case if someone stole my bike when I didn't bother chaining it.

Why are you going to get on my case when I use some parental controls to attempt to help keep my kids safe?

So no, I don't necessarily agree with this law, but I also don't agree with the attitude that kids should have all the rights that adults have, including viewing all the content they want on the internet without restriction, when the parents are responsible, and the attitude that parents are some kind of Nazis when they restrict what their kids can do.

Re:people or property

[MonkWB]

I was a perfectly stubborn kid/teen (I am 20 now) and I still insist on learning most things on my own and making many mistakes in the process. When I was 17 I even went so far as to be on a trip in DC with my sibling and going to meet three people who I had merely met on the internet and playing games. This did not end up badly at all and I even met one of the guy's parents. Of course there are people out there who are bad, but assuming everyone is surely does not help. I am not at all advocating meeting people from the internet though; there are things that can be universally accepted whether stubborn or not learning from others mistakes whatsoever. It is a plain thing that anyone can understand, your child may want to try drugs or have relations of which you do not approve, but is much more likely that she will NOT try to meet someone over the internet. Social training already stresses the dangerous act of trusting those on the internet, you do not need to utterly destroy the child's ability of knowledge because you fear the unlikely and easily preventable action of meeting someone via the internet in person.

Re:people or property

[Lord Apathy]

Well, as a parent I'm legally responsible for my kids, so NO, they DON'T have the same rights as adults. Sorry to burst your bubble

I've been stating this for a number of years. People that don't have kids really have no business telling parents what their kids rights are. Kids don't have the responsibilities as adults so they can't have the same rights.

Of course now I've said that there will be some arm chair parent who thinks because their brother has kids they know everything there is to know about parenting.

Re:people or property

[geniepiper]

I don't have kids. At 60 years of age don't expect to have any; but, I have never thought that children have the same rights as adults. Parents do need to monitor their children, and should not be blamed for doing so. Should the government get involved? Probably not. It will just give a false impression of security and give lazy parents an excuse not to keep tabs on what their little lambs are up to.

Re:people or property

[ytpete]

I think what makes many people uncomfortable with this is that parents would be able to "spy" on their kids. Restricting what sites, TV channels, etc. your children can see is perfectly understandable; secretly monitoring their social lives is harder to justify.

Re:people or property

[RPoet]

I agree with him on the level that they should be doing more to catch the predators and less to incovenience the victims

The children. "Victims" and "children" are not synonymous.

Re:people or property

[Anonymous Coward]

This demonstrates the battle between two competing and mutually exclusive legal approaches to minors: 1) as citizens with the same rights as any other, and 2) as the property of their parents.

The article does not demonstrate any such thing, but this quote demonstrates that you must be a minor yourself because:
1) While minors may be citizens, it is well established that minors do NOT have the same legal rights as an adult citizens.
2) Only a minor who still depends on their parents for everything would consider themselves property of their parents. In legal terms parents are considered custodians or guardians of children. Not only can parents not force children to do things, parents are often held responsible for their children's actions.

Re:people or property

[mapkinase]

I think you are exhaggerating quite a bit. Parents have responsibilities. Wise parents use their power wisely (in any ways). Bad parents will abuse their power or neglect their children. I say, more power to the wise.

Re:people or property

[rkd2110]

You'd get on my case if I complained someone stole my cell phone out of my car when I didn't lock it. You'd get on my case if someone stole my TV when I didn't bother closing the doors on my house. You'd get on my case if someone stole my bike when I didn't bother chaining it.

Those are some of the saddest analogies I've ever seen.

Have you ever tried talking to your TV and explaining it that it shouldn't allow itself to get stolen? Have you ever tried to teach your cell phone not to stay in unlocked cars? Probably not, because that would make very little sense or good.

But guess what? You can talk to your children! They are not inert items like your cell or TV. You can reason with them (I know they're children, but still, give them some credit), you can have a conversation with them and maybe, with luck, even establish some sort of trust with them. A trust that will not require from you to monitor them as closely as you feel you must now.

Your children are your family, and hopefully, your friends. They are not the enemy. When you are trying to restrict their freedom, without consulting with them and without trying to understand them, you treat them like such.

While I'm legally responsible, they DO NOT have the same rights as adults.

I don't want to be too harsh but after reading your post I'm really not sure if it's your children that you worry about, or you legal liability for their actions.

Re:people or property

[Anonymous Coward]

"This demonstrates the battle between two competing and mutually exclusive legal approaches to minors: 1) as citizens with the same rights as any other, and 2) as the property of their parents."

This demonstrates the battle between two competing and mutually exclusive societal approaches to minors: 1) as perfectly valid targets of opportunity -- like any other person, and 2) as developing, yet still quite fragile individuals. The difference is what your intentions are regarding kids.

Re:people or property

[arkanes]

As long as statutory rape is a crime, then the state has no business treating children as adults with adult responsibility in any area. This includes trying a minor as an adult just because they did a very bad thing, or even a thing which wasn't unusually bad but happened to get a lot of media attention.

Re:people or property

[vertinox]

You'd get on my case if I complained someone stole my cell phone out of my car when I didn't lock it.

Depending on your insurance company (you should check this is you are concerned) it is your fault if you fail to take precaution.

Some home insurance policies (like my own if you read the fine print) for fire and theft won't cover certain things if you either A.) Fail to have your alarm turned on and B.) Fail to lock your door.

That said it is pretty easy to claim on B.) since they have to take your word *cough* and you could break a window as well, but if A.) fails to fire then it is hard to claim theft loss in your house because your alarm is supposed to automatically call the cops. (Now I suppose you could somehow cut the phone lines but I digress).

In fact many people who have been victim of RDIF key hack thefts of new vehicles often can't get their insurance companies to pay up because the insurance companies believe that is impossible for someone to by pass the security feature of those keyless cars although it has been demonstrated that you can.

So yeah... Most of the time in the eyes of the corporate world it is your fault you left your car unlocked, but most cell phone insurance policies cover loss as well so it is a moot point.

Not that I agree with the insurance companies policies of the world, but it is a hard fact of life.

And on an aside...

While I'm legally responsible, they DO NOT have the same rights as adults.

My main problem is that the government will often try minors as adults and there are so many laws that are bipolar on the legal responsibility of a child. If a child murders someone they don't charge the parent for the crime as well. Not to mention a child can have a fucked up credit record before they are 18 (due to parents negligence and using their social security number to get credit cards etc... had a relative that did that to their kid).

Again... I disagree with a great deal of the government and corporate polices but it doesn't make it not so.

Re:people or property

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When a predator victimizes a child, the parents get blamed for not better protecting their children.

Since when?

When a child gets molested, it's generally down to one of two things.
a) The child is kidnapped by the molestor.
b) The child is enticed, or "groomed", by the molestor.

Is case a), no one, no one, could possibly blame the parents for not better protecting their children. Unless we're talking about parents who are known to leave their child home alone regularly, in which case we are really talking about neglect. You can't protect your children from kidnappers that appear our of thin air without chaining them to the wall in your basement or endorsing a police state. And both of those actions are even more wrong than the child actually getting kidnapped.

In the second case b), we're talking about parental neglect plain and simple. If you are so distant from your own offspring, who are living in the same house as you, that you didn't notice they were being lured away right under your nose, then sorry, you've taken your eye off the ball. I'll admit that, yes, you're not a mind reader and neither do you have a sixth sense, but people need to talk to their children about these things. The reality is, people know more about their coworkers social lives than they do of their children's. How sad is that.

So no. No reasonable individual blames parents of the victims for not better protecting their children. Anyone who does so is a sociopath.

Re:people or property

[arkanes]

I've never heard anyone, not even serious far-out libertarian gun toting militants, suggest that parents installing censorware on their home computer was ever a violation of anyones rights. Things like the (now defunct, and somewhat infamous) censorware project were about extending your rights, as a parent, to know just what the software on your machine was blocking.

Outcries against censorware in Slashdot are almost universally about government mandated use of it, and/or it's use on public or semi-public computers, such as library machines.

Now, theres lots of reasons not to bother with censorware. One of them is that using it as a crutch instead of communicating and monitoring your child is poor parenting. But using it as a tool to assist you isn't any more a violation of anyones rights than putting a cover on the pool when you have a toddler is.

As an aside, because I don't feel like making a second post:

More children are victimized by their parents every day than have ever been attacked by someone they met through MySpace.

The bill doesn't state how to check if someone is a minor. That's because it's impossible, and the people writing it know it's impossible, and this is stupid political grandstanding.

Re:people or property

[kabocox]

So no, I don't necessarily agree with this law, but I also don't agree with the attitude that kids should have all the rights that adults have, including viewing all the content they want on the internet without restriction, when the parents are responsible, and the attitude that parents are some kind of Nazis when they restrict what their kids can do.

I think that only kids 12-18 should be allowed to vote. The only ones allowed to hold office ought to be those over 18. I think that AC is right. Kids have always been treated as property until they had enough income to break out on their own. I'm an adult on the verge of thirty. I get angry alwasy reading this comments that basically say that parents, schools or the government should take away such and such rights of kids. Public school kids aren't taught to live in a democracy; they are taught to live in jail and do what they are told from their betters. Just because you are a parent, teacher, government offical doesn't make you magically better than either the average citizen or the average school kid. Life experience is overrated. We only use that as an excuse to keep kids in their place. It's the same sort of excuse nobles used that the peasants shouldn't have rights because the nobles are better and more experienced at ruling than those peasants. Well, we are using age the same way now a days.

Re:people or property

[gfxguy]

As you mentioned, though, they are just kids. As much as I may try, most kids don't always make the best decisions. So yes, kids can be reasoned with, but just like adults it's only to a point.

Only a kid, or someone without kids, is going to tell me that I'm treating them like the enemy by restricting their freedoms. Let's examine what restricting their freedoms means. They are not allowed to go to bed when they want. They are not allowed to eat whatever they want. They are not allowed to be out all night. I'm restricting their freedoms, and believe it or not, most people appreciate what their parents tried to do for them when they grow up and have kids of their own.

I don't want to be too harsh but after reading your post I'm really not sure if it's your children that you worry about, or you legal liability for their actions.

My kids are more important to me than anything else in my life, but it's my legal responsibility (not just in upbringing, but, for example my responsibility to pay restitution for my kids vandalism, god forbid) that proves that legally my kids do not have the same rights as adults.

Re:people or property

[Anonymous Coward]

More children are victimized by their parents every day than have ever been attacked by someone they met through MySpace.

I HATE people that treat their children like property. It's just wrong. Why do you think our society is so greedy? It all starts with bad parenting.

Re:people or property

[gfxguy]

I'll agree that public schools are a bad example, so is government meddling - which is why I have said several times I disagree with this law. If the kid acts up in school, though, maybe carving his name in a desk, who is responsible?

Sure, the kid might get detention or something, but they come to me for the money.

If the child is malnourished, they blame me.

If the child doesn't get medical attention, they blame me.

If the child doesn't have a coat in winter, they blame me.

Forget about the issue at hand for a moment, and thing about this. My kids have a bedtime that I enforce. My kids are not allowed to eat whatever they want, they eat what the rest of the family has at meal times they ask permission to have snacks. My kids don't go over their friends house and stay as long as they want.

As adults, we have the ability to make these decisions for ourselves. We can stay out all night, we can stay up late whenever we want so we can play video games or read slashdot.... we can try to exist on pizza and ice cream, although we wouldn't exist for very long, would we? And so we don't try to exist on pizza and ice cream, we even force ourselves to eat vegetables, god forbid! Do you think your average 10 year old is going to have that kind of restraint?

Kids simply don't make very good choices, that's all their is to it, and that's why PARENTS (stop bringing school, nannies, the government into it - that's not the issue, that's not what I was responding to). Parents don't always make great choices, either, but at least we take responsibility for our actions. When some 16 year old gets in an alcohol related car accident at 2:00 in the morning, the first thing we ask is why on earth the parents let a 16 year old out that late - WITH THE CAR? What were the parents thinking?

Re:people or property

[porcupine8]

Oh, whatever. Show me a single parent that doesn't sneek a look in their kid's diary now and then to make sure the words "pot" and "sex" don't show up. I'm not for parents constantly monitoring everything their kid does, but I'm quite sure that when I have kids I'll be glancing through their IM logs occasionally. The trick is not letting on that you know about anything that's not life-or-health-threatening, so as not to embarrass the hell out of them.

Re:people or property

[Fastolfe]

Children are presumed to not understand the consequences of their actions. This is why they are never convicted of crimes, because the commission of a crime requires intent. If, on the other hand, you believe that the child did understand the consequences of his or her action, and was mature enough to understand that what they did was wrong and criminal, there's no reason they shouldn't be tried as an adult.

Children don't magically become adults just at the moment they turn 17 (or whatever it is in your state). This age is just the boundary for presuming their competency as an adult. This presumption can be challenged (in either direction).

Re:people or property

[arkanes]

If, on the other hand, you believe that the child did understand the consequences of his or her action, and was mature enough to understand that what they did was wrong and criminal, there's no reason they shouldn't be tried as an adult.

Criminal cases are the *only* circumstance where we allow "after the fact" recognition of children as adults. There's emancipation of minors, but you can't retroactively emancipate yourself or someone else. This is inconsistent and hypocritical.

I use statutory rape as an example because, by definition, statutory rape is consensual sex with a sexually mature partner. If you can, after committing a crime, be judged to understand the consequences of your action and mature enough to understand that what you did was wrong and criminal, then there is no reason why you can't make those same decisions about your sexual activity.

Re:people or property

[cayenne8]

"This demonstrates the battle between two competing and mutually exclusive legal approaches to minors: 1) as citizens with the same rights as any other, and 2) as the property of their parents."

When I grew up..it was DEFINITELY #2. I believe children are the property and responsibility of the parents.

Sure, if there are signs of real abuse (spanking is not abuse, but, a time honored way of getting a young childs attention), let the state step in, but, otherwise...butt out!

Re:people or property

[tehcyder]

Let's examine what restricting their freedoms means. They are not allowed to go to bed when they want. They are not allowed to eat whatever they want. They are not allowed to be out all night. I'm restricting their freedoms, and believe it or not, most people appreciate what their parents tried to do for them when they grow up and have kids of their own.

Don't ever forget that on slashdot there are a lot of teenagers reading and posting who would argue that these restrictions on their freedom are in themselves wrong, never mind the possibility of restricting their access to the internet.

When I was ten or twelve, I used to get really annoyed at having to go to bed when I was told, or go to school if I was feeling tired; but as you say, as an adult I can now see that it would have been irresponsible of my parents just to let me do what I liked all the time.

When I was young, my parents didn't censor my reading at all, but that is not at all comparable to accessing the internet. If you meet a monster in a book, it can't arrange a meeting with you in real life.

Re:people or property

[jvkjvk]

Yeah, but that's no different than how the gov't feels about the rest of us either. And come to think of it, that attitude appears to hold legual sway at the moment as well.

Re:people or property

[BalanceOfJudgement]

If you can, after committing a crime, be judged to understand the consequences of your action and mature enough to understand that what you did was wrong and criminal, then there is no reason why you can't make those same decisions about your sexual activity.

Which is why, then, statuatory rape shouldn't be a crime in the first place. Was that what you were getting at? Because the logic was split between posts I'm not sure I grasped your meaning.

If that was what you meant, I agree with you. In my own experience, treating "minors" as though they had a brain and could think intelligently usually leads to them doing so.

After that it's merely a question of experience, which you can only gain with age.

Re:people or property

[BalanceOfJudgement]

Give me a break. My mother never did that, because she and I spent a great deal of time building an environment of trust in our home. She didn't do it because she trusted me, and trusted I could make good decisions, and was there for me when I made mistakes.

Don't try to pass off your distrust of your children as some kind of parenting technique. It's a stopgap measure at best and when they learn that they can't trust YOU, you'll see why what you're advocating doesn't work.

Re:people or property

[w1ll0w]

Yes but the internet can be used as a dangerous weapon. I certainly would give her a gun to keep as she is only 9 and I don't want her to learn the hard way that guns are dangerous. Kids are kids and their innocence is working against them in this day and age. I'm not saying we should allow our children to not make mistakes, but there are mistakes that we shouldn't allow them to make. When they are older and more responsible then the parents should trust them more to make right decisions. But a trusting child thinking that the love of her life is a high school freshman like her might want to meet up with them. She might learn the hard way that anonymous nature of the internet has hid the fact that this guy is a 40 year old child molester and she has to endure the pain of trusting him and being violated. That's all I'm saying. Some things are too great a responsibility for an irresponsible child to handle. I've been there to, I'm 29 and seeing society change so much over my lifetime has given me a more protective nature for children than before.

Re:people or property

[kabocox]

As adults, we have the ability to make these decisions for ourselves. We can stay out all night, we can stay up late whenever we want so we can play video games or read slashdot.... we can try to exist on pizza and ice cream, although we wouldn't exist for very long, would we? And so we don't try to exist on pizza and ice cream, we even force ourselves to eat vegetables, god forbid! Do you think your average 10 year old is going to have that kind of restraint?

Kids simply don't make very good choices, that's all their is to it, and that's why PARENTS (stop bringing school, nannies, the government into it - that's not the issue, that's not what I was responding to). Parents don't always make great choices, either, but at least we take responsibility for our actions. When some 16 year old gets in an alcohol related car accident at 2:00 in the morning, the first thing we ask is why on earth the parents let a 16 year old out that late - WITH THE CAR? What were the parents thinking?

About the only food difference between my diet and the kids is quantity and lunches. They get public school lunches for about $5 the week. I pay $6.15 for McDonalds for a slightly larger meal. I try to enforce a 9 pm ish bedtime. They get baths anywhere from 7-9. I get a shower in the morning somewhere betwen 6:45-7:15. I don't think that I could handle them taking morning showers. They'd use up all the hotwater. You know. Humans don't make very good choices. I'm more along the lines of let folks find out the hard way rather than try to prevent the hardway from existing through government regs, school policies, parnoid parnets, and jailing/forever labeling all those that look at attractive 15-18 yearold girls as sexoffenders. If an 15 year old commits a felony odds are that they'll be treated and sentenced as an adult. The kids that are criminals get adult punishments, but have never had the chance to change the laws/morals under which they were judged. Where you ever asked to make the public school rules? Nope, we spend the first day reading the school rules, then signing them, and then taking them home to get your parents to sign them. I never had an chance to change them. Heck, even as an adult I don't know how to get a public school rule changed if I don't agree with it.

I hate to be cruel, but I support God's decision to allow us to have free will and that means that I should let idiots and their childern make bad/stupid decisions that could cost them their life. Every law/rule that we make and attempt to enforce only limits free will. Some day, some one will figure out how to make humans behave like perfect little robots. There will be an outcry to have unruly kids and criminals treated like that. Then it would be applied to those that disagreed with the system and then shortly everyone would just be mindless robots.

Re:people or property

[kfg]

Yeah, but that's no different than how the gov't feels about the rest of us either.

And you get adults to accept that by teaching it to them when they are children.

that attitude appears to hold legual sway at the moment as well.

They're workin' on it.

KFG

Re:people or property

[Ed_Pinkley]

What if you have a child that you can't trust? What if you're kid has a drug problem? What if he/she is acting out in dangerous ways? Kids are not perfect. They make bad decisions. (As we all do.) It's a parent's job to keep those decisions from being detrimental to them.

Re:people or property

[BalanceOfJudgement]

Absolutely. I'm not saying "the parent shouldn't be involved unless there's a problem". Just that the assumption of mistrust shouldn't be the starting point.

Re:people or property

[Fastolfe]

In my own experience, treating "minors" as though they had a brain and could think intelligently usually leads to them doing so.

This is a good point and I agree. For the last few generations we seem to place so much importance on protecting our children that we are preventing them from growing up. This would seem to make protecting these children from harm all the more important, which just exacerbates the problem. You end up with useless, immature and irresponsible 20-year-olds that then need to rely on social programs. "Just do it for me!"

(Of course, I have no statistics to back this up, just my perceptions.)

Re:people or property

[sumdumass]

Wierdly, this is were a property argument comes back into play. A person with the parrents permision can engage in sex, well marriage actually which hints that sex is also involved, with a minor child who apears to be sexulay mature (i think over 14 in my area).

I'm not sure I would go for making an all inclusing rule saying when a person hits puberty they are fair game. There are several situations were a more experienced person could just take advantage of them and if they had a few more years experience with their sexuality they never would fall for the same lines. This is somewhat of a preditorial situation though. Not every situation would be the same. But I don't know if it is just me or what but i find the idea of a 30 year old man having sex witha 14 year old somewhat firghtneing and perhaps preditorial.

However, I am having problems with saying a 18 or 19 year old should be jailed for statutory rape when having a sexual relationship with someone 4 years younger. And if both were over 18, it would be normal to hae 4 or more years difference in the age of partners.this is especialy disturbing if one was held back a few grades or the younger person was advanced a grade or two and they shared classes together.

Re:people or property

[Fastolfe]

It's important to remember that back before we had this thing called "society", when people became sexually mature, they started having children. From a biological standpoint, this is how we were meant to work. The whole argument that it's evil and predatory is strictly a sociological thing invented by ourselves. Our society has grown so much more complex and complicated that it really is necessary to postpone adulthood just a little bit, because kids simply aren't ready yet to jump into adulthood when they hit puberty. But when people start saying that the desire to have sex with a teenager is the sign of a mental illness, that's only true in the sense that the person has not, for whatever reason, conformed to the social norm.

(I'm not trying to legitimize the behavior, because assault and murder are equally instinctive to us and we consider them wrong, but by the same token, it's not accurate to say that every murderer must be "sick" or have mental problems.)

My two cents, at least.

Re:people or property

[sumdumass]

I wasn't trying to infere they were sick. Although I do understand other would. I guess my point goes along with your in the society has grown so complexed that a thirty year person would have the knowhow to subject themselve on a not yet socialy or mentaly develpoed person. All the experiences I have could ruin a teenage woman. And just placing her leagal age of consent at 18 instead of 16 or 14 gives her the opertunity to be exposed to some trial and error attempts by less experienced people around her own age.

Now, Maybe that's just a personal opinion. It could be I'm the only one who thinks that relationships could be exploited. The result is usualy a screwed up partner after the fallout. Maybe I'm looking too far into that side of it. I do know if i took the same situations and applied it to other things like poker, most people would see it the same way. As in If you just started playing poker and I have ben playing for 15 years, then when I take all your money, your dog and your house by letting your win some and roping you in, It would almost be as if I took advantage of your situation. Teens just becoming sexualy mature probably don't understand whats going to the degree an older person would. You or I would have a better graps on it and be less prone ot getting run over by someone wanting to take advantage of the situation.

Then again, I have watched Jerry Springer, so maybe some never learn.

Re:people or property

[Fastolfe]

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable view.

bad karma?

[dpreformer]

While I don't think the law is a good one it seems to me a workaround for the federal law saying only an account creator can have access is to only allow minors to create pages on accounts their parent creates.

First post!

Re:bad karma?

[Registered Coward v2]

While I don't think the law is a good one it seems to me a workaround for the federal law saying only an account creator can have access is to only allow minors to create pages on accounts their parent creates.

I believe federal law trumps state law. The fine state senator in GA should be aware of that; someone from Ohio drove home that point a while ago.

Re:bad karma?

[techno-vampire]

In practice, the stricter of the two applies. Thus, if your state's minimum wage is lower than the federal, you must pay at least the federal minimum. If, however, the opposite is true and you pay exactly the federal minimum, you're still in violation of state law.

Re:bad karma?

[Registered Coward v2]

In practice, the stricter of the two applies. Thus, if your state's minimum wage is lower than the federal, you must pay at least the federal minimum. If, however, the opposite is true and you pay exactly the federal minimum, you're still in violation of state law.

True, because you can meet both by meeting one; however the GA law appears to conflict with federal law so the federal law would trump state law.

Re:bad karma?

[Surt]

You can meet both by meeting one:
Only allow adults to create accounts (at least in GA).

If a kid wants to create an account, tough luck, ask mom, dad, guardian.

Re:bad karma?

[Thirdsin]

So you are saying that you do not think the law is a good one etc etc...I ask you how in the redneck is this bill enforceable? If my imaginary kid signsup on MySpace without my permission, MySpace is responsible for the 12yr old kid saying 21 on the little form?? Purely a political stunt for his re-election year.

Did I mention I very much dislike politicians not using common sense to serve their constituents? Perhaps he could create a bill addressing Global Warming (Climate Change, I don't care) and pollution controlls that Bush has destroyed... Ok WHY IS THIS ON SLASHDOT!!!!

It started on topic... I tried really :'-(

Re:bad karma?

[nwogoldberg99]

True, our founding fathers set up the Constitution so that anything not mandated by the federal government was left up to the states. However, since federal law governs the right to privacy, it would seem that the state cannot make a law regarding this that would conflict.

Even if this passes and is somehow upheld, you will find many kids have a friend's parent setup their account for them. Or, worse yet, the kid will have to help/show their parent how to set up an account for him/her. In theory, it sounds like a good idea, but it doesn't make for a good law.

Uhh... what?

[JanusFury]

Staton cited statistics on dozens of teens who have been molested -- or murdered, in some instances -- by people they met through MySpace.com, according to law enforcement officials.

So, wait... dozens out of what, like 10 million myspace users? That's less than a hundredth of a percent. If anything, these statistics should indicate that he should be solving more dangerous problems, like car accidents or parental child abuse or teenage drug use, not chasing after imaginary problems.

Re:Uhh... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

well more like 151,889,876 users.....in my network

Re:Uhh... what?

[the-amazing-blob]

Abuse, rape, torture, molestation.

They get headlines.

They get politicians elected

Thus, they get attention of politicians

Re:Uhh... what?

[bergeron76]

Agreed! I live here in Atlanta, GA, and I can't believe the pinheads that get elected here (Republicans)!

We can put a man on the moon, and soon Mars; but we can't take care of our own kids without legislation being introduced. Sheesh, the Republicans are acting more like Democrats these days, and the Dem's are acting more like Republicans! What's going on!?

Re:Uhh... what?

[Antony-Kyre]

Understand this. Lawmakers need to show they are doing something productive. By doing idiotic things, that may or may not work, instead of tackling the tough issues, they are enticing voters to re-elect them.

Re:Uhh... what?

[hrvatska]

The vast majority of kids are molested by a relative or a friend of the family. By the reasoning of this bill, we should be considering banning all contact with relatives and friends of the family, or at least requiring that two or more adults be present with a child if they're not alone. Just so they can keep an eye on one another.

Re:Uhh... what?

[joshetc]

According to Estey Bomberger nearly 33% of all females and 14% of all males are molested before the age of 18.

If the real number is anywhere NEAR that, cracking down on social networking sites would be completely misplaced resources. As you said, dozens out of millions. Thats less than 1 in 1000 people.

If anything I think the law should require parents to do their job, otherwise face charges by reason of neglect.

Re:Uhh... what?

[42Penguins]

And what if they're both child molestors?
The FBI should have video stations set up in each room the child is expected to be in, since many crimes happen within the home.

Re:Uhh... what?

[PopeRatzo]

Wait 'til the Georgia parents figure out that almost every one of those kids who were molested or murdered also listened to some form of pop music. A very high percentage of them also went to school, so it's time we take a look at radios and blackboard erasers as causes.

It's about time we crack down.

Re:Uhh... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

these statistics should indicate that he should be solving more dangerous problems

But the children! You have to think of the children! The precious children! No, I'm not concerned about the millions of children dying in wars, or children working in factories, or children dying of disease. Let's get our priorities straight! We need to do something to protect the pure, innocent, tiny children on MySpace.

If you watched more primetime television, perhaps you'd be better informed. Haven't you ever seen that "To Catch A Predator" show on MSNBC? The scary child predators are everywhere, and we need to do something to protect our children. One of the primary fronts in this war on child predators is on Myspace.com.

Re:Uhh... what?

[greenhaven]

Or better yet, just spend time teaching the kids to be net-savvy enough to understand that SeXYGrL69 probably isn't very sexy, or a girl, and then we won't have to deal with this. Frankly, it looks like the Georgia legal system is tired of listening to the parents of victims complain about how easy it is to track down children on the Internet.

Re:Uhh... what?

[AlHunt]

We can put a man on the moon, and soon Mars; but we can't take care of our own kids without legislation being introduced. Sheesh, the Republicans are acting more like Democrats these days, and the Dem's are acting more like Republicans! What's going on!?

The nanny state is growing, that's what's going on. You guys in GA need to squash the crap out of this legislation, please.

Re:Uhh... what?

[belmolis]

Got any statistics from a less self-interested source? That seems awfully high, and given the history of false child molestation cases created by unqualified "therapists", I'm reluctant to credit such a source.

Re:Uhh... what?

[QuasiEvil]

Nah, the Republicans are talking and acting like Democrats, and the Democrats are talking like Republicans but still acting like Democrats. Meanwhile, those of us who prefer conservative economic policy combined with a very libertarian social view are completely out in the cold. At least before the religious nuts overran my party, us quasi-libertarian types still had a refuge there.

Now, I'm a registered Dem. Switched parties not necessarily because I agree, but because I want the modern Republican party kept in check and defeated, if possible.

Re:Uhh... what?

[c6gunner]

They also claim that only 35% of these abuses are reported, so unless I'm getting the math wrong, his would mean that something like 100% of females and 40% of males are molested before they're 18. Seems a little high, eh?

Re:Uhh... what?

[couchslug]

"Abuse, rape, torture, molestation.

They get headlines.

They get politicians elected

Thus, they get attention of politicians"

Especially when other politicians are doing it!

Re:Uhh... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, wait... dozens out of what, like 10 million myspace users? That's less than a hundredth of a percent. If anything, these statistics should indicate that he should be solving more dangerous problems, like car accidents or parental child abuse or teenage drug use, not chasing after imaginary problems."

No, myspace has 160 million accounts registered. How many are spam/adults and how many are the "kids" in the age group that's targeted by these predators? You decide.

Re:Uhh... what?

[the_womble]

Hundreds or thousands have been molested by people they met in shopping malls, schools and streets. Lets ban roads! Do not allow unaccompanied minors into malls! Only allow them into school accompanies by a parent! Think of the children!

Why not keep kids safe by locking them up until they are 18? Some parents seem to be getting pretty close to that already.

Re:Uhh... what?

[nwogoldberg99]

Although I disagree with the legislation, I understand where they are coming from, but I think you're missing the point. What they're trying to do is restrict the point of contact between the predator and the child. Social networking sights are a common way for predators to find their victims. I don't think "pop music" brings a lot of predators in contact with children. Maybe if Justin Timberlake were a pedophile, I would give you some leeway on this one.

Re:Uhh... what?

[charlieman]

Car accidents are so underrated this days *sigh*...

Re:Uhh... what?

[SeaFox]

So, wait... dozens out of what, like 10 million myspace users? That's less than a hundredth of a percent. If anything, these statistics should indicate that he should be solving more dangerous problems, like car accidents or parental child abuse or teenage drug use, not chasing after imaginary problems.

Silly poster! You're confusing politicians with people who actually do things.

Re:Uhh... what?

[pipatron]

This should be Score: 2, Sad, not funny. :/

This seem to be exactly what most legislators secretly wish.

Re:Uhh... what?

[PopeRatzo]

I don't think "pop music" brings a lot of predators in contact with children. Maybe if Justin Timberlake were a pedophile, I would give you some leeway on this one.

Well, he IS the new King of Pop.
How bout video games, you think THEY bring a lot of predators in contact with children? Anything that's used by kids can be used by predators to lure kids.

Re:Uhh... what?

[tinkerghost]

Yeah, we definately need to bring the Pinto back. That'll put some excitement back into car accidents.

Re:Uhh... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a much better idea:

1. LE should troll through MySpace to find evidence of under-age drinking and illegal drug use. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. (When I, a 44 year old man, had a crime committed against me by a 17 year old stranger, my attorney used his MySpace profile to build the case against him!)

2. LE should arrest the parents of these kids, and have the kids put into foster homes until the investigation is complete.

THERE! With NO NEW LAWS, parents will ALL OF A SUDDEN be responsible for their kids.

Re:Uhh... what?

[Cornflake917]

Abuse, rape, torture, molestation. You forgot to include movies made by Uwe Boll. (Seriously, he needs to go to jail for that shit)

Misquote

[tuxlove]

the Athens Banner-Herald quotes Facebook's CPO saying that federal law forbids the company to allow anyone but the account creator to access it..

This isn't at all what the article quotes. It says:

Under the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, we cannot give anyone access to or control of an individual's profile on Facebook

I don't see how this would preclude rules that require all future account creations to be done by an adult...

Re:Misquote

[ytpete]

But it easily could preclude this part of the bill: (quoted from the summary)

"[and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times"

Re:Misquote

[tuxlove]

If the parents are the only ones that can create pages, then there is no legal issue with them accessing the pages. They would actually be the page owner, and would in essence be allowing their children to access their page.

Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[NonSequor]

...but I think the world might actually be a better place if MySpace were crippled or shut down by these sorts of nanny laws. I think that MySpace is a net negative for mankind.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[mobby_6kl]

I don't think My Space a net negative. IMO it's nice for the idiots to have their own place to hang out, instead of running around molesting the real internet.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree with you, seriously, but to a much more extreme side.
if i could emp the entire earth, i would, and not think twice about it.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[sanyasi]

NO!
"I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it" - Voltaire.

Myspace might be horrible in your opinion but this is when if you truly believe in freedom of speech you would still support them.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[Anonymous Coward]

i cannot completely agree with you there. im not a fan of censorship, but come on, shit like nambla?
i think any website that only spews pure garbage (like how to get away with molesting children) should be more than demonized, the people that created and maintain such sites should be held responsible for their actions. but of course, anyone with absolute power will end up abusing it. this is exactly why the Lord warned the Israelites against putting themselves under a king, and, if you know the story, it was a bad bad mistake that they did it anyway.
it all comes down to who has the authority and wisdom to know what we should not do. my guess is, the person that made us would know what is good for us and what is not. if the 10 commandments were obeyed by all, we would live in paradise. unfortunately, since the inhabitants of this world have decided not to follow them, we are living in a world that simply cannot get any better.
lucifer truely is brilliant, though... he has even the 'christians' convinced that the only words God Himself wrote in the bible (exodus 20), on two tablets of stone to show their permanence, are no longer applicable. if that isn't strong observable evidence for an archdeciever and the battle of good vs evil i dont know what is.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[Lord Apathy]

The parent has a very good point. As someone who remembers the net before the September That Never Ended it would be nice if we had more places like MySpace. That way could herd all the morons into a nice safe box where they couldn't hurt each other.

Of course this is the place where I would suggest once we get them in the box we plug up all the air holes, but that would mean.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[NonSequor]

Voltaire didn't actually ever say or write that. That phrase first occurred in a The Friends of Voltaire, written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906. She intended it to be a summary of Voltaire's philosophy on personal freedom. However, many people mistook this for a quotation and attributed it to Voltaire.

Anyway, I think you're getting a little bit wound up over a silly little snide comment. I do not support laws that hinder freedom of speech.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[virgil_disgr4ce]

I think that MySpace is a net negative for mankind.

Why?

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[norman619]

Oh really? How is myspace.com any different from any other real world place where teens gather? Oh yeah it's MUCh easier to make ignorant statements like your rather then actually deal with the real problem.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[oddfox]

If you were being at all serious, it's really rather frightening that you'd actually endorse bad laws simply because they scratch a personal itch of yours. MySpace is junk in my opinion, therefore, any legislation aimed at it (And likely to be detrimental to it, very much so) has my full support and praise. You've been deluded to the point of believing that the best way to eliminate a problem is to create a whole other host of 'em.

MySpace isn't the net negative for mankind, this brand of apathy is, and unfortunately it's too deeply ingrained in too many minds.

Not that this legislation has a snowball's chance in hell of being passed and upheld in court. It is not my job to police who views my website or utilizes it in any fashion. This applies just as much for personal websites as it does for larger projects like social networking sites. Does anyone know the last time a newspaper, for example, was held liable for similar situations as the ones being bemoaned in the media regarding MySpace? Never, that's when, and it should damn well stay that way. Raise your own damn kids and stop ballooning the already massive federal government.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I don't give a damn about myspace. One kid getting harmed is one too many.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[Anonymous Coward]

Myspace is more like a bar than a newspaper. Whether you like it or not, bar owners have certainly obligations under the law, like not serving alcoholic beverages to minors. Society needs to figure out what the equivalent responsibilities are as all of this technology evolves. As we move into more immersive virtual reality technologies, my "bar" anaogy will become more and more fitting, and your "newspaper" analogy will become more and more outmoded.

Blaming it on the parents is a cop-out. Who wants to live in a world where bars can serve anybody, and the parents have to lock their kids in their bedrooms. We need a balance of responsibility on behalf of all involved parties. And let's not be coy, if you setup a myspace, you have made yourself an involved party. Nobody is forced to operate a social networking site against their will.

Re:Normally I'm on the side of civil liberties...

[oddfox]

Ugh, modern day Luddites, how fun.

MySpace does not facilitate anything other than sending intra-site messages between people. I could just as easily say a site like DeviantART needs to have these nanny laws to prevent kids from talking to (and eventually meeting) someone. Furthermore, statistically MySpace and the rest are insignificant in terms of online predation. But I guess it's okay to ignore what's really going on and chant think of the children! What next? Pressing charges against someone running an IRC server because someone happened to run into trouble through it? After all, the admins can see everything going on with a standard IRC server, they should do some enforcing!

For your second paragraph, no, it's not, and good job on missing the point entirely, which is the government has no business creeping into this part of our lives and should not be allowed to do so. Stop shifting the responsibility of raising your children and realize that you're making a mountain out of a molehill with this.

why not ban parenthood?

[anagama]

Funny this from GA. Southern states have a rep for "close" familial relations. I doubt that most child-sex-crimes are perpetrated by outsiders anyway no matter what state we're talking about. Sure, the "be afraid of the internet" cases are the ones that get the headlines, but for the most part, it's mom or dad who are directly at fault. So why not just ban parenthood? Parenthood seems much more risky to children than the net.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Itninja]

Well, one can only assume that banning people in Georgia from reproducing could do nothing but help the situation. Because everyone knows that everyone from Georgia is a dim-witted, incestuous, bigot. I mean it has to be true; there are like millions of sitcoms about little else.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[anagama]

Indeed, a quick google search turned up this: http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/commen tpost.aspx?news=no&postid=18080

Choice quote:

[chart showing 40% decline in sex abuse between 1990 and 2000]
All forms of child abuse, not just sexual abuse, are undergoing a dramatic decline. Of course, you'd never know this from the hype the media is giving the cases of online related sexual abuse that they can trace back to MySpace or Facebook.

[chart breaking down sex abuse by relationship]
The amazing and sad statistic that is so often overlooked and rarely discussed is that 95% of Child Abuse and Sexual Abuse is perpetrated by family members. 79% of perpetrators are parents. Other relatives accounted for 7% and unmarried partners of parents and "other" accounted for 4% and 5% of abuse.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Funny this from GA."

Georgia is also the state that did or tried to ban sex offenders (if I recall, there was no distinction between pedophiles versus rapists) from school bus routes. iow, if the bus route went by or was changed to go by a sex offenders house, they couldn't live there.

Georgia is also the state that has a male black athlete in prison for getting a blow job by a 15 year old girl who initiated it. He was 17. The mandatory sentence? 10 years *minimum*. The law, in turn, was changed after his sentence, but not made retroactive despite supposedly doing so because of said athlete's case. The prosecutor, in turn, has not asked for the sentence to be set aside, mainly, it seems because said prisoner didn't take his "medicine" aka plea bargain. Stupid law, racial prejudices, and what should be prosecutorial misconduct all rolled up in one. (The same state gave 90 days in a plea bargain to a female white teacher having sex with a student.)

I was in Atlanta for a few days. I'm from Pennsyvlania, but I could see there was racial tension down there that I haven't seen in Chicago, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, or NY. It was palpable to an outsider. One thing that was impressive though how polite, civil, and nice the people generally were, at least outwardly.

I thought PA had some screwed up prosecutors and laws, and we've had our share of ridiculous abuses (Bernie S., overreaching police powers, police abuses) but other states make our lawmakers look sensible on some days.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[westlake]

I doubt that most child-sex-crimes are perpetrated by outsiders anyway

The argument is irrelevant.

Protecting your child from the predators within doesn't exclude taking actions to protect your child from the predators without.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[happyemoticon]

Just as a side note, the biggest problem with rooting out or finding child sexual abuse is that children under the age of 10 can be made to say anything if goaded long enough, and eventually they will fabricate elaborate false memories to supplement these statements. If you put any determined adult in a room with any 8-year old, given enough time, they could eventually have that kid saying up was down or Uncle Benny touched him this way or that way, which, ironically, could be classified as abuse. Many law enforcement agencies have done exactly that, because at best the officers or attorneys in question were simply convinced they were right and that the kid had repressed memories or some other such bullshit, and at worst they were corrupt jerks out to catch bad guys - who cares if they have to brainwash a few little shits in order to catch em?

Mind you, I have no special knowledge in this subject beyond some college psychology classes.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[myowntrueself]

Indeed, a quick google search turned up this

Pah, google?

You only need to look at alt.sex.stories and then only at the headers of the articles not the actual content... (they use tags to describe the nature of the stories).

Most of it is incest, pedophilia, necrophila or bestiality (and thats not an exclusive-or).

Almost all of the pedophilia stories are also incest stories.

There are few incest stories which are not also pedophilia stories.

And amazingly enough, most of it seems to be generated from within the USA.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[jZnat]

I guess it's better to get out your feeling in writing rather than physical actions like, I dunno, molesting children. Basic psychology...

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Anonymous Coward]

All forms of child abuse, not just sexual abuse, are undergoing a dramatic decline. Of course, you'd never know this from the hype the media is giving the cases of online related sexual abuse that they can trace back to MySpace or Facebook. Well, in all fairness the data presented on that chart is only up until 2000. You can hardly draw any conclusions about MySpace type websites with such "old" data.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[lysergic.acid]

that's not suprising at all. hopefully there are protocols in place to identify this kind of stuff.

and while we're on the subject of child abuse, what of adults brainwashing/indoctrinating their kids? can this be legally prosecuted as a form of child-abuse? a friend of mine showed me clips of a documentary called Jesus Camp recently about some pretty extreme evangelical communities that seriously scared the living shit out of me. I'm much more concerned with the indoctrination of children with fanatical beliefs in their home communities than their exposure to diverse online cultures through social networking sites.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[myowntrueself]

I guess it's better to get out your feeling in writing rather than physical actions like, I dunno, molesting children. Basic psychology

Yeah but at the same time I can't help but think that many of these stories are based on the personal experiences of the authors.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my friends from college is a social services caseworker in a Georgia county that shall remain unnamed. The most common form of abuse that her agency deals with is incest. Methinks that rather than worrying about predators on the internet, they should spend a little more time focusing on predators within families.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[kabocox]

So why not just ban parenthood? Parenthood seems much more risky to children than the net.

Do orphans in an orphanage feel better off than their friends with a family? I don't disagree that it can't be done, but you'd have to create an environment that those that come out of it see it as better than the tradional family. Here is another requirement. Those that have kids should want to put their kids into that enivornment for their educational/social advantage and not to get rid of them or just to send them to a boarding school. Once we figure out how to do that long term profitably, then your tradional family structure will be in trouble. The family isn't going any where any time soon because we know that we can provide more educational/social advantages to our childern under our direction rather than under any one else's direction.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Most of it is incest, pedophilia, necrophila or bestiality (and thats not an exclusive-or).... ....And amazingly enough, most of it seems to be generated from within the USA.

Unsurprising. There's this book called "The Bible" with all that and then some. They sell it at Walmart for $6.71. You can even get it on MP3 in the same location for $13.62. No age ID required!

That country is depraved.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly; but it does suggest the proportion to which your attention ought to be allocated.

Re:why not ban parenthood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I'm liking this idea. Is it retroactive?

Kneejerk reaction

[Skadet]

I was about to respond with the typical "parents' responsibility" blather, but then I thought about it some more and realized it's more insidious than that.

It really is about parental control, and parents should be up in arms about this. As it stands (in America, at least), once your kids are waiting on the corner for the public school bus in the morning, your kids belong to the State. A child student has to have parent's permission for an asprin, but not for an abortion.

Parental rights are increasingly in jeopardy in America.

This is one step down a slippery slope, and a good time to make a stand. The bottom line is that your kids are yours to raise -- no matter how much some may disagree with your parenting tactics -- and we are standing to lose that right. This is only the first step.

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[jumpingfred]

I don't remember the schools doing abortions. Have things changed?

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[Belgand]

Yep, you made 'em, you own 'em. Screw that crazy notion that children might actually be their own people. Screw it in the ear I say!

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[Lehk228]

i agree it is asinine that youths require parental consent to get asprin

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[somepunk]

The bottom line is that your kids are yours to raise

This isn't (just) a battle for control for children betweeb parents and the state, its a question of when do the children get which rights of their own. The parents' rights are already limited in very narrow cases, such as abuse, etc.

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[DAtkins]

Some people are allergic to aspirin...

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[Watson Ladd]

You're comparing apples and oranges, my friend. The school doesn't offer abortions, and kids don't need permission to take aspirin outside of school.

Re:Kneejerk reaction

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I don't remember the schools doing abortions. Have things changed?

Oh Yeah! They do all kinds of stuff now. Abortions, orgies, satanic rituals, weegie boards, sleepovers, wedding receptions, the works. Also we're putting covers on the TPS reports now. Did you get that memo?

It's in writing folks!

[Itninja]

Staton said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don't log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said.

1) John Law says 'companies, make this happen'
2) Companies say, 'wait...what?'
3) ???
4) Safety for children everywhere!

Re:It's in writing folks!

[azakem]

Pretty much reminds me of this.

Re:It's in writing folks!

[julesh]

1) John Law says 'companies, make this happen'
2) Companies say, 'wait...what?'
3) ???
4) Safety for children everywhere!

Actually, step 1 is the missing step of this plan:

1) Set up limited liability corporation
2) Advertise "age-verification service" that doesn't work
3) ????
4) Profit (until somebody sues you for providing a service that doesn't work, at which point you fold the company and keep all the nice stuff you bought with the profits).

Enforcement??

[sidz1979]

And how do they plan to enforce this?
What if the site was hosted in some other country/state? Do they have the jurisdiction to go after such sites?

It seems like the legislators assume that the entire Internet is based only in the United States, and they have the power govern it like a public asset. :-|

Re:Enforcement??

[Stormx2]

I'd imagine they'll go after the Georgia ISPs for helping to break the law... It can't exactly be prosecuted on a federal level (I hope I'm using the right terminology here, I'm not from the US) because there is no law that has been broken.

I do partially disagree with you mind. The laws are already pretty absurd when it comes to censorship, this is just expanding into the infinite democracy of the internet.

But yeah, this shouldn't be done. Teenagers have rights too. Who says that the moment you turn 18 you don't have to do this? Education, not terrible laws should be the force driving people to understand the implications of posting stuff on myspace.

And anyway, myspace will never give in. Murdoch is a greedy bastard, a blip on his empire will mean nothing.

Re:Enforcement??

[Secrity]

>> "I'd imagine they'll go after the Georgia ISPs for helping to break the law..."

They can't do that. The only thing they could do would be to force the ISPs to block myspace.

>> "It can't exactly be prosecuted on a federal level (I hope I'm using the right terminology here, I'm not from the US) because there is no law that has been broken."

Proper term. Yup, it would be a state law, not a Federal law. I have absolutely NO idea how myspace could be expected to enforce such a law.

>> "The laws are already pretty absurd when it comes to censorship, this is just expanding into the infinite democracy of the internet."

They have already been spread into the internet. Other than the obvious China and Saudi Arabia, many other countries also do internet censorship.

>> "But yeah, this shouldn't be done. Teenagers have rights too."

Teenagers have absolutely NO rights other than those rights that the government and their parents allow them to have. In most cases in the US children do not achieve the age of majority until the age of 18.

>> "Who says that the moment you turn 18 you don't have to do this?"

The people who elected the people who make the laws.

>> "Education, not terrible laws should be the force driving people to understand the implications of posting stuff on myspace."

I don't believe that education will work, and I am not sure if such education could be funded.

>> "And anyway, myspace will never give in. Murdoch is a greedy bastard, a blip on his empire will mean nothing."

Yup, although I don't think that there is anything for him to give in to.

Oh boy!

[Lord Bitman]

Time to receive another insincere reply from my state representative!

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you validate a parent? What if the kid just says "no, that person isn't my parent?" Why can't I call some random hotmail address set up for spam my legal guardian?

And what makes these silly people in Georgia think any kid would click "I'm below 18" if it then didn't allow them to register without parental permission?

Oh please, any kid that wanted to not have parental permission could easily just lie. And any that do want their parents viewing their myspace or facebook can easily set their information to public anyway. I doubt if more then a fraction more kids would have their parents watching their "social networking" sites.

I'll advertise myself as a permission proxy

[gelfling]

What with being a child molester. I'm sure all my new 'friends' will go for it.

As usual...idiots

[YrWrstNtmr]

illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission

And how, precisely, do you intend to enforce that? One of the reasons the CDA, in 1996 and 1997, and the COPA in 1998 and 1999, were shot down was because this concept is unworkable. Then and now. You simply cannot verify who is sitting at the keyboard.

And then of course we get into the weird definitions. What is a 'social networking site'? Just Facebook and MySpace? Or /., Digg, and Fark as well? And of course, this does nothing for a site based offshore somewhere.

Re:As usual...idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easily enforceable with an "I'm 18" button.

Re:As usual...idiots

[mongoose(!no)]

The definition problem could be very problematic.

If they say any sites with interactive, user created content, that leads to a lot of problems.

If they're very specific. Sites might find ways around it.

In the first case, what happens to all the small sites like PhpBB forums and the like when they have to deal with implementing this?

Re:As usual...idiots

[dsoltesz]

Actually, the more applicable law (at least similar to what Georgia's attempting) here might be COPPA (see the text of Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) which addresses what kids can do on the 'net more than what adults can put online that children might be exposed to. By requiring minors (under 13) to have verifiable consent from a parent/guardian, so it does part of what Georgia's trying to do. Not sure why the law didn't extend to teenagers - possibly because of conflicts with "age of consent" related laws (yeah, IANAL). IMHO, leave these types of laws to the Federal government -- state laws are too varied and difficult to enforce. There needs to be consistency across the board.

Re:As usual...idiots

[PunkOfLinux]

nope. my cousins who are both in their mid-twenties don't have any credit cards. Debit cards, but no credit cards.

Re:As usual...idiots

[YrWrstNtmr]

Duh - you just require a credit card.
100% of adults over 18 have credit cards.

A) No, 100% of adults do not have credit cards.
B) Little Timmy 'borrows' moms credit card from her purse for 5 minutes.

Re:As usual...idiots

[pruss]

I agree about the vagueness. I think a social networking site is defined as one that lets you maintain your own web page. I don't know what counts as "your own web page". If I start a new topic in an online forum, is that topic "a web page"? It seems to be. Is it "my own"? Well, in some sense, no, because I do not exercise complete control over it. But on the other hand, I assume facebook users don't have complete control over "their" pages.

On the other hand, about enforcibility, obviously it cannot be enforced in all cases--just about nothing can. But it is a fallacy to conclude that it cannot be enforced at all. One could require anybody who wants to join to send a notarized agreement, with the notary having examined the proof of age in the case of adults, and with a notarized parental agreement in the case of kids, with the notary having examined birth/adoption certificates. Of course, this would probably force the sites out of business, since it would be too much of a nuisance for people to sign up. But it certainly could be done. The question is whether it would be desirable to do it.

I do think that at least if kids are doing something where there is no presumption of confidentiality, it is quite reasonable that parents should be able to see it. There is no presumption of confidentiality in posting in a public arena (and that includes sites where one needs to sign up, as long as everybody is allowed to sign up; facebook is a borderline case, since only people at an educational institution can sign up). There is, however, a presumption of confidentiality in email, in IM, and in telephone conversations, and so that should be respected, except in extreme situations (just as it is OK for law enforcement to tap these in extreme situations--of course the privilege can be abused).

Ugh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid lawmakers. This is ridiculus. If the parents can't keep track of their kids, and their kids are stupid enough to meet someone through MySpace or Facebook, then screw them. The govt should NOT have to get involved for any reason. If the parents and/or the kids are stupid then fine, let's thin the herd. I'm tired of stupid people.

QFT - idiot.

[Irish_Samurai]

From TFA:
"Staton said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don't log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said."

There is no real way to do that. Who is liable if the minor works around the security and makes a page? What if said minor created a page and NOTHING happened aside from a parent finding out the page exists? What is an acceptable form of verifying parental consent?

This proposal is a prime example of people who don't know jack about how the technology works trying to legislate it.

Re:QFT - idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

The parents who failed to control their kids should be liable. Parents are liable for their children. I know, you can't control your children. Right. That's your parenting failure. Yes, I have two daughters. Yes, I look at what they post online. Yes, I trust them to do intelligent things, but I'm still responsible to keep them safe. I'm straight forward about it; I look at what they post online with them, and they know I can check what they're posting when I'm not in the room with them. They also know that if they try hard enough, they can get around it, but they trust me to not interfere with "their lives" as long as they play by the rules. However, they're young, and I'm giving them a safe environment to learn.

As for technological answers, well, require a credit card to sign up. I know, that's brutal. However, it works just fine for the post office to verify forwarding addresses, so it will work for parents to know that their kids signed up for myspace or whatever. If credit cards aren't ubiquitous, then let them authenticate with a drivers license and mail a letter to the address on the drivers license. I know, children of illegals still won't be able to get accounts, but you've got a 99% solution there.

Re:QFT - idiot.

[Mr. Underbridge]

There is no real way to do that. Who is liable if the minor works around the security and makes a page? What if said minor created a page and NOTHING happened aside from a parent finding out the page exists? What is an acceptable form of verifying parental consent? This proposal is a prime example of people who don't know jack about how the technology works trying to legislate it.

Well, you make the company liable just as bars are liable if a kid uses a fake ID. That's the approach they'll likely take, assuming this is found Constitutional the fist time it's tested, which it won't.

Re:QFT - idiot.

[julesh]

Well, you make the company liable just as bars are liable if a kid uses a fake ID.

If there was actually a working scheme that allows you to prove your age online without placing trust in a dubious third party and which wasn't trivially breakable, I'd buy that. But there is no Internet-based proof-of-age scheme that works. Generally, anyone with access to a credit card can acquire one. Anyone who doesn't trust the apparently-dodgy businesses operating in the area with their credit card details can't.

That's the approach they'll likely take, assuming this is found Constitutional the fist time it's tested, which it won't

Unfortunately, an unenforceable law still costs the rest of us time, convenience and money, because anyone who doesn't want the hassle of being prosecuted and having to take the case through multiple levels of appeal to have the law declared unconstitutional will comply with it anyway. Don't think for a moment that if this law is passed, every blogger account there is will be suspended until its owner can prove their age, whether or not the owner is even in the US. How many great blogs will we lose?

Re:QFT - idiot.

[Mr. Underbridge]

If there was actually a working scheme that allows you to prove your age online without placing trust in a dubious third party and which wasn't trivially breakable, I'd buy that. But there is no Internet-based proof-of-age scheme that works. Generally, anyone with access to a credit card can acquire one. Anyone who doesn't trust the apparently-dodgy businesses operating in the area with their credit card details can't.

Not saying I agree with them, but the lawmakers' response is likely something along the lines of "that's your problem." Not to mention which, faking IDs isn't even challenging either, so the parallel is a reasonable one.

Unfortunately, an unenforceable law still costs the rest of us time, convenience and money, because anyone who doesn't want the hassle of being prosecuted and having to take the case through multiple levels of appeal to have the law declared unconstitutional will comply with it anyway. Don't think for a moment that if this law is passed, every blogger account there is will be suspended until its owner can prove their age, whether or not the owner is even in the US. How many great blogs will we lose?

At least they get struck down fast and I'd imagine there would be a temporary injunction against blocking them pending outcome of the case. I can hear it now, "Someone think of the bloggers!"

Re:QFT - idiot.

[julesh]

Not saying I agree with them, but the lawmakers' response is likely something along the lines of "that's your problem."

Which is funny, seeing as the only workable solution I can think of (an internationally-organised public key distribution system that ensures that everyone can get a key and that their identity is appropriately confirmed) is on the sort of scale where only governments could achieve it.

"difficult to enforce"

[eleuthero]

The lieutenant governor's comment about the senator's proposal being difficult to enforce is a decided understatement. The state of Georgia is purporting to fine a website (if the bill becomes law and there is lack of compliance) who has its servers somewhere besides Georgia (and is also operating out of Cali). Even if they were in Georgia it would be a difficult law to enforce because of the interstate nature of websites. If Georgia wants such a restriction to be effective, it needs to get its national representatives to propose legislation.

How about...

[frakir]

... requiring parents permission anytime kid wants to get on the bus? How about letting kids in the mall only with written permission?

you know, shit can happen on the bus....
in fact, shit can happen anywhere.
How about a site hosted in Romania or Israel?

State laws can not and will not replace neglecting parents.

Re:How about...

[Registered Coward v2]

How about letting kids in the mall only with written permission?

Been to a mall lately? I could go for that; plus require two forms of ID.

Re:How about...

[Ixitar]

That is already in place on the most part. The Mall of America has had a curfew for the past ten years. I remember kids getting into fights on a Friday evening. Since the curfew, I have not seen a single fight.

unenforcable

[timmarhy]

i don't know how they intend to enforce this dribble, it probably won't even make it to that stage.

congress gone wild!

[DragonTHC]

this is just bad legislation.

the parents of that bullied kid should have sued the parents of that other kid for defamation of character.

otherwise, the bullied kid should grow a set and post back.

online bullying is called a flame war and it's been going on since the Internet began.

we all deal with it.

If we accept restrictions on children in general..

[mi]

Why are we opposed to these ones? Why is the Senator (and the entire State of Georgia) being called names?

Kids (depending on age) can not drive, buy tobacco and alcohol, open bank accounts, stay out late, or marry without legal guardians' consent. Heck — a few months before birth they can even be killed by their mothers (with doctors assistance).

So, what's the fuss about restricting their on-line socializing? It is not like their real-life socializing is not already restricted (and always has been)...

How the Hell

[Enderandrew]

How the hell do these pend end up determining what counts as justice in our society?

Do they have any clue how such a system might be implemented? Is it even remotely feasible to determine who is a child, and whom their parents are while maintaining any semblance of privacy?

Is a private company just supposed to know exactly whom every minor and their parents are worldwide? Can we invent a special kind of web browser that forces kids to truthfully enter in their correct age?

And in truth, wouldn't that help child predators more than hurt them?

My head hurts.

Because, y'know...

[Veinor]

Porn sites technically must require proof of age, and none of THEM ever get any visits from children.

Correction...

[Belial6]

"This proposal is a prime example of people who don't know jack about how the technology" + raising kids to be well functioning adults + "works trying to legislate it."

Irrelevant

[AgentFade2Black]

The site is hosted outside of Georgia (all the way in California, as it were, if I am correct.)
Therefore (IANAL), they should not be subject to this law.

Absolutely pointless law, really.

Re:Irrelevant

[Lectrik]

I'm sure Georgia can work up a good extradition deal with Cali... then the police can just cram MySpace into the back of a police car and drive it to Georgia.

I can understand how you can prove you are 18 [Use of a credit card number, Can you accept any string of 16 digits as "A credit Card Number"?], but how exactly do you prove you are someone's parent?
Of course I'd solve the problem of [alleged] parents not being able to read and control the child's social pages by requireing all social networking sites to have all pages accessable and editable by all visitors.

As for my Age-checking software, it will consist of a 1024 question test on obscure pop-culture trivia from 18 years ago. missing 1 question will perma-ban your IP block [You darn kids and your non-static IPs] from accessing the web-server. passing the test will cause the site to generate an encryption key (the reason for so many questions) that will allow the user to access the site for a limited time [infinity minus one is acceptable to congress]

Lies, Damned Lies...

[The Monster]

That's less than a hundredth of a percent.

Somebody tell this guy about the correlation between DMHO ingestion and sex crimes! It's 100%

What a yutz. Let's say this guy gets his law. What practical method is there for a state legislature to require a website based on servers in some other state to verify the identity of people who want to edit pages there?

Some online services marketed to adults take a credit card as a way of proving you're an adult. They place an authorization on your card, perhaps even charging some nominal fee, which if accepted by the card issuer is sufficient proof of age. How hard is it for a teen to slip Mom's credit card out of her purse, write down the card number, expiration date, and the verification number on the reverse, knowing that if it's just an authorization, she'll have no way to know, and if it's a one-off charge of a buck or three, she still probably won't notice. Or maybe Precious Child has his own Visa Buxx, and uses that to prove he's an adult.

So that's clearly out. Is he going to create some state agency to give online credentials to adults? Uh-oh. I just realized that in posting this comment, I'm within the definition of 'create or maintain a Web page', and I don't believe I've shown anyone my drivers licence here.

The internet provides fertile new ground for evildoers, whether they're pedophiles or politicians.

Re:Lies, Damned Lies...

[anagama]

That should be DHMO -- you link to a typo squater. The real link is: http://www.dhmo.org/

You need to lose that right.

[FatSean]

Parents should not have the right to raise their children 'no matter how much some may disagree with your parenting tactics.'

How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?

Until we can control who breeds and who doesn't breed, laws regulating parenting tactics will continue to grow more numerous in response to irresponsible parents. Or, we recgonize that our conceit that 'all life is precious, especially innoncent children' is a pipe-dream with no connection to reality.

Re:You need to lose that right.

[Skadet]

Parents should not have the right to raise their children 'no matter how much some may disagree with your parenting tactics.'

Why not?

How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?

What about them?

I find no compelling argument here; rather, there is no argument of any kind.

Re:You need to lose that right.

[darkenbinary]

You need to read Huxley's Brave New World and then we'll see if you have the same opinion. It sounds like this is the type of world you are shooting for. Society will always have its racist, religious fanatics, and rejects, but they are the minority. (Someone please tell the popular press that) If we keep making laws like this the government should just take all children at birth and raise them to be mindless obedient drones. Obviously they don't think parents who were shaped by their society in the first can raise their own children anymore.

Re:You need to lose that right.

[acwork2]

"How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?"

Parents absolutely should have this right! I would never want the state to be able to tell me that I had to rise my child to believe in religion X Y & Z. Or even worse you start getting into the terrifying ground of the sate saying that all children must be taught a state approved religion.

When it comes to parents teaching children to be sexist, racist, etc. While it may seem morally wrong to society that is a right that parents should have. Its also something that is going to happen no matter what laws exist. Children are a product of their environment. Even if you had some hypothetical situation where a racist parent didn't teach their child to be a racist. If that parent is a racist the child will pick up on that and for a good portion of their life they will automatically assimilate those views.

The great part of our free society is when the child grows up they will be free to hear views that oppose those that they were raised hearing and will be free to change and form their own opinions. Then they can spread those views on to their children.

Government intervention into child rearing wouldn't just be a slippery slope...it would be an avalanche of epically disastrous proportions!

Re:You need to lose that right.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about parents who want to teach their children from birth that religion X is the only true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? OH NOES! A religion that believes that doesn't believe in any other religions and tries to employ religious outreach! D@#n those parents and the evil things the do to their kids... :-P

Re:You need to lose that right.

[Pfhorrest]

How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?

They've got a right to teach they kids what they think is right and wrong. To say otherwise is to say that the State gets to determine what the truth is and what everyone ought to believe, and there goes freedom of thought right out the window.

Of couse, none of that is to say that society (e.g. through public schools) couldn't or shouldn't teach kids otherwise, and parents who bitch that public schools are teaching falsehoods ought simply to tell their kids that - though the question then becomes, who will the kids believe, when the schools say the same thing about the parents?

Let the parents teach whatever they want and let the schools teach what we-the-people want. Let everyone speak what they feel to be the truth, and everyone decide for themselves who is really telling the truth. That's what freedom of speech is all about.

Re:You need to lose that right.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Until we can control who breeds and who doesn't breed, laws regulating parenting tactics will continue to grow more numerous in response to irresponsible parents.

And wait, lemme guess. Once we do have those laws, paragraph 3 subsection 7 will state that FatSean(18753) gets his nice fat Hareem made up of the women who would otherwise have bread with the unworthy. How noble of you to do your part in raising a more mature generation.

Re:You need to lose that right.

[jvkjvk]

Parents should not have the right to raise their children 'no matter how much some may disagree with your parenting tactics.' Why not? Ok, I'll give it a shot - Because at some point, the rights of the child outweigh the rights of the parent.

First, one must dispense with the edge cases. Actually, these are the only cases one needs to look at to settle this. I can see off the bat situations where parents do not have the Right: If the parent is causing lasting physical harm or through inaction causing such; If the parent is molesting the child; If they are keeping the child from becoming educated (able to read, write, maths, logic, science, etc.).

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Since these cases exist, that means there must be some limits to parent's rights on raising their children, else one must agree that these are perfectly acceptable parenting practices.

So, no, parents don't have the right to do what they want to their children under the guise of 'raising them up right'. There are limits.

Compelling enough for you?

Of course, this isn't black and white. That's why there's debate on this touchy subject. I find it curious that there is a large vocal minority that stands for Absolute parenting rights, yet nowhere does one find any sort of minority that stands for Absolute state rights. Either one is a dangerous faith to have, IMO.

I think the larger fertile ground is to be found debating what types of interventions are necessary, to find a balance. It doesn't help the dialogue to loudly exclaim the supremacy of Parents Rights, because that is a specious argument.

The real debate isn't whether we as a society should intervene in certain situations, but in what situations, to what extent, and (the devil being in the details) through what set of mechanisms. It is particularly troublesome because people aren't machines. The same stimulus given to two different people in similar situations can produce dramatically different results. Not to mention that the unintended systemic consequences of our actions are unknowns.

However, none of these difficulties should prevent us from trying to make a better world for our children and ourselves. Not that I think this bill is a good way to ensure either of these things.

yet another Georgia Republican....

[ce33na66]

tries to make another stupid law.

Since the religious radical republicans have taken over the state, I've had serious thoughts of moving back to TN. At least TN hasn't gone completely down the political toilet like GA.

responsibility or control

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The flip side: (1) does a parent have the responsibility to look after their children [protect them from harm etc] and the responsibility to ensure that they grow up "right" [provide moral guidance etc] -vs- (2) does the parent have the right to control their offspring?

I hunch you are not a parent, or at least I hope you aren't! You have clearly no idea as to how to provide the correct environment for a child to grow up.

Re:responsibility or control

[heinousjay]

I'm scared since you implied you are a parent. Your children will grow up learning how to get defensive and draw specious conclusions based on no evidence when it suits there agenda. Probably end up in politics...

Re:responsibility or control

[1u3hr]

The flip side: (1) does a parent have the responsibility to look after their children [protect them from harm etc] and the responsibility to ensure that they grow up "right" [provide moral guidance etc] -vs- (2) does the parent have the right to control their offspring?

Yes they do have the right and the responsibility. They can exercise that. They can't ask the government (or MySpace) to do it for them, if they do that they are failing in that responsibility.

And I am a parent.

Re:responsibility or control

[Thexare Blademoon]

Well, if they end up in politics, at least they were prepared for a paying job. Their parents did part of their job, I suppose.

Re:responsibility or control

[w1ll0w]

Possibly, but the world is screaming out for parents to control there children since they end up shooting people and when laws are put in place to help them do that in today's high-tech society every one screams children's rights are being trampled. Which is it, do you want parents to be involved or not? A law like this could be abused by some parents but others might be able find problems and deal with them better than if they didn't have this in place. Personally I don't think this law will make it, maybe for good enough reason, but stop telling parents to watch their kids and then tie the parents up and blame them when their kids do something seriously wrong.

Re:responsibility or control

[Takumi2501]

Before I even start here... no, I'm not a parent. I do however, have a strong opinion on this subject.

I don't think that children should be allowed to use the 'net unsupervised. Put all the "parental controls" in place you want, it's still a bad idea. Period. More and more, I see people substituting technology for good parenting, and it worries me a great deal.

That being said, I understand that there's no 100% way for parents to enforce a policy like this (I'm sure little Johnny has friends with internet access and more lenient parents) but don't go blaming the internet boogyman because it's a convenient cop-out.

I think that the best way to handle a problem like this is to let them understand the situation, and hope that they'll make rational decisions, just as it is with any other parenting issue.

Re:responsibility or control

[Jartan]

How about you provide them with the foundation to find their own morals instead of this "guidance" you speak up?

That's the root of the debate. Do you as a parent have a right to use your control to put them on a morality railroad that you see fit? What if you are Christian and your kids grow up to be atheists? Do you get to sign in to your 16 year old daughters my space account to make sure she isn't consorting with any dangerous heathen boys?

I'm not saying you're that sort of horrible parent but they DO exist and their is little question that they are infringing upon rights that their children should have.

Re:responsibility or control

[gfxguy]

Yes they do have the right and the responsibility. They can exercise that. They can't ask the government (or MySpace) to do it for them, if they do that they are failing in that responsibility.

Of course they can ask, they just don't have the right to FORCE the government or MySpace to do it. If MySpace willingly does it, too then too bad. If the government tries to force MySpace to do it... well... that's what the Supreme Court is for, and that's why they threw out COPA.

Re:responsibility or control

[hrvatska]

Speaking as a parent who has raised children, I don't think watching your kids means being invasive in every aspect of their lives. It doesn't mean pre-emptively reading their diaries. It doesn't mean saying that they can't have private phone conversations. And to me, that's what saying you have to have access to their myspace account amounts to. Watching your children means spending a substantial amount of time with them. Going to all of their school functions. Volunteering to be their coach. Talking to their friend's parents. Setting curfews and sticking to them. It isn't so much watching as participating.

Re:responsibility or control

[rtb61]

Further too that point, minors do not have the maturity to decide what is appropriate to published about themselves, their family or their friends. Once it is out there on the internet, you can never call it back.

A immature person can do a lot of damage to themselves and to others based upon what they publish and unlike old media sources where everyone soon forgets, the internet will remember what was published for a life time.

Minors rights to privacy laws also are affected, what right does your child have to publish images or video of other parents children, none, absolutely none. Obviously forums that target children are flouting these long standing laws.

The only legal space I can see for minors, is where the parent has specifically given permission and the parent is willing to take full legal responsibility for the activities of the child on that forum or a monitored interconnected school based forum.

Corporations treating the privacy of minors as a profit center is about the worst possible use of the internet.

Re:responsibility or control

[TapeCutter]

"draw specious conclusions based on no evidence when it suits there agenda."

"Probably end up in politics."

Yes minister!

Re:responsibility or control

[Poruchik]

You can provide guidance, so they will know what they are doing in the future. You should provide oversight NOW.

I can teach my 3 year old not to play with matches and knives. In the meanwhile, I will make damn sure he cannot get to them. The analogy may not be perfect, but it works. Young kids are not mature enough to make certain decisions by themselves.

Re:responsibility or control

[twosmokes]

I don't think finding out what your kids are doing on a networking site is as important as finding out what information they're giving out. Before the internet boom, it was difficult for a child to advertise to every ne'er-do-well in the country that he was going to the skating rink on Saturday.

Of course talking to children about what information they give out is important. But kids make mistakes. They're supposed to, it's how they learn.

Re:responsibility or control

[BalanceOfJudgement]

Corporations treating the privacy of minors as a profit center is about the worst possible use of the internet.

Communist!

Errr... sorry, I forgot for a second that capitalism DOESN'T mean the unbridled abuse of every human dignity. Corporations in America should learn that, lest they become the poster child for your statement (not that they aren't already).

But then again, that's bad for business, so we can overlook it.

Re:responsibility or control

[w1ll0w]

Neither do I, but the child molesting people are going to gravitate towards these types of sites. So they are in more danger than if they are going to nickelodeon.com. Just last night I was watching supernanny with my wife, granted it's a tv show and the whole situation was probably totally bogus. But the father had never seen the 12 year old daughters site. She had pictures of her in bras being sexually explicit. Sexually explicit photo's everywhere. The father I think thought as you do, give her her privacy. Like I said before it was probably crap because I would think social services would have taken the kid away because the parents were so negligent. Now it's easy for a kid to go on these sites and put up pictures that they think are funny, maybe she was messing around with her friends or something. She puts them up there for the world to see. I'm not sure how secure these sites are but someone can get the information from them to track people down. It's not that hard for anyone on /. to know that this is very possible and a potential problem.

Re:responsibility or control

[orgelspieler]

That was Wife Swap (ack!), not Supernanny (yay!). I don't watch Wife Swap, so I didn't find out whether they bothered to mention that 12 year olds aren't supposed to even be on MySpace according to the ToS! I'll bet they didn't. ABC loves to work up the "oh noes! pedos on MySpace!!1!" angle any chance they get.

Re:responsibility or control

[MightyMartian]

Oh yeah, that's right. Millions of kids shooting people...

Just because a nation of 300 million has a few thousand psychopathic killers doesn't mean there's a big problem here. The real story behind all of this is press-fueled hype over isolated incidents and cheap, useless politicians locking into that to look tough on crime, tough on sex, or tough on whatever they think in their foul little hearts will get them elected.

who else wondered which Georgia?

[philbert2.71828]

Did anyone else wonder after reading the headline whether this news had to do with Georgia the country or Georgia the US state? Maybe I'm just not US-centric enough.

Re:who else wondered which Georgia?

[aGuyNamedJoe]

I wondered which Georgia -- part of why I read on.

Dear FaceBook,
      Please allow Johnny to open an account.

Responsibly yours,
      his mother

Re:who else wondered which Georgia?

[radioactivecow]

yes

Re:who else wondered which Georgia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets pick the one that is more important by GDP. Georgia (state) - 363 billion. Georgia (country) - 6.395 billion.

That didn't work out... what about population? Georgia (state) - 9,363,941. Georgia (country) - 4,474,000.

Oh well, looks like state wins by quantifiable objective measure. In the future assume state unless stated otherwise, or if these measures become close (10% seems fair).

Re:who else wondered which Georgia?

[bohemian72]

Sorry. I meant "Athens" as in the home of both REM and the B52s, not "Atlanta."

ok. whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

first off i realize this is mainly targeting myspace and it's users which is roughly 150 million accounts with hundreds off thousands getting deleted everyday. with all the incidents that have occurred because of myspace it's still about 1000th a percent of its users have some wrongful crime committed against them. I think this is incredibly stupid, but hey if they pass it, i'll just forge my mothers credentials like i do for school anyway, plus i really dont think they will say anything about my account due to the fact it states i'm well over the legal age of 18, it says i'm 103.

But what this all really comes down too is the ignorant parents that dont stop there kids from being on there if they arent mature enough to handle it.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[Anonymous Coward]

a few months before birth they can even be killed by their mothers (with doctors assistance).

And a few months before that, their daddy can squirt them into a tissue and flush them down the toilet - while they're still alive, no less.

Crap

[Cervantes]

It's all crap. It's not even Think of the Children (TM), it's just some senator looking to get some media attention that will be in the back of everyones mind at election time.

I won't even go into all the other things that generate more risk than your kid having a myspace page. It just hurts my head.

Isn't there at least one senator, somewhere, who will introduce some sort of "Responsibility in Parenting" act, which will say things like "It's your responsibility to teach your children not to put their full name, DOB, picture, address, physicals, schedule and phone number up on the internet for everyone to read. If someone uses it to get to your child, you are partially responsible for raising a STUPID CHILD."

I vote that the acronym for this particular act be: DARWIN

On another, slightly more serious note... how is it that MySpace is responsible for people putting their vital information up on teh intarwebs, but McDonalds isn't responsible for people getting unhealthy, sick, and dying-earlier-than-they-should from their food? (The "Cheeseburger Bill")

Re:Crap

[Lithdren]

On another, slightly more serious note... how is it that MySpace is responsible for people putting their vital information up on teh intarwebs, but McDonalds isn't responsible for people getting unhealthy, sick, and dying-earlier-than-they-should from their food? (The "Cheeseburger Bill")
Myspace doesn't have as many lobbyists as McDonals.

Also, McDonalds lobbyists are really REALLY huge, and when I say huge I mean big-mac huge, and squish all the smaller lobbyists. The only ones who escape are small enough to fit between the folds of blubber on the McDonald lobbyists. That or they work the the oil companies and are really hard to get a good grip on, the slimy bastards.

Thus Democrazy was born.

Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that not a single governmental figure seems to possess even a basic understanding of how the internet works? How could the people who write and pass our laws be so completely oblivious to such a fundamental part of today's society?

The internet may not be anonymous, but it's pretty damn close, and you just can't stop people from signing up to websites regardless of their age. MySpace is *not* going to introduce a credit card check to ensure new registrations are limited to adults. The moment they do that, then they've lost a vast majority of their users. I'm not saying most MySpace users are under 18, but most people in general simply don't want to put their CC information into those kinds of sites.

You can't stop kids from creating accounts that their parents don't know about. You can't force people to use their real name when opening an account (as mentioned in a previous article some weeks back), and you definitely can't keep people 100% safe from online predators, no matter how effective your system's age policies are enforced. I know it's said about two-thousand times per second here on Slashdot, but it really is a job for the parents.

All of these laws are just horribly inadequate attempts to convince us that safety can be assured by strict enough regulations. And it most certainly can *not*.

Re:Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

How could the people who write and pass our laws be so completely oblivious to such a fundamental part of today's society? If you think that is bad, you must not realize the distance between legislation and science in this country.

Which has no place on Slashdot

[electrosoccertux]

This story has no place on Slashdot, as

a). we don't have kids
b). if we don't have any kids, then we're certainly not married
c). social networking? What is this adjective "social" you are talking about?

I kid, I kid [sorry].

Re:Which has no place on Slashdot

[Achromatic1978]

c). social networking? What is this adjective "social" you are talking about?

Don't get cheeky. We know perfectly well what social networking is. Social networking sites are what /we/ build so other people than ourselves can get dates!

Re:Which has no place on Slashdot

[Ucklak]

c). social networking? What is this adjective "social" you are talking about?

The Zune. C'mon. Haven't you joined the social?

Re:Which has no place on Slashdot

[tinkerghost]

Don't get cheeky. We know perfectly well what social networking is. Social networking sites are what /we/ build so other people than ourselves can get dates!

You didn't add the backdoor to view all the female profiles & report back that you're a perfect match for all the hot ones? Were you drinking and coding again?

Send your letter to his mother

[EmbeddedJanitor]

She vets all his mail!

It can be done

[EmperorKagato]

"[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. "

This can be done by forcing everyone to register with their SSN and require their parents SSN to register. As well as send out a letter and email to the parent for verification and the parent must call the company via phone.

There are lots of downsides to this method, yet I'm sure they'll find something that works.

As long as we do not run into these situations

Re:It can be done

[cdrguru]

Why would you (stupidly, IMHO) use SSN for this purpose? Sounds like another misuse of a government index value that should have no other uses as was mandated by law when it was created.

Re:It can be done

[Ixitar]

It also ignores that fact that the greater majority of the world's population does not have a SSN. As an expat, I have become painfully aware of the fact that many people in the US seem to forget that there is an entire world out there that is not the US.

Re:It can be done

[julesh]

This can be done by forcing everyone to register with their SSN and require their parents SSN to register.

1. I'm not familiar with the scheme, but how do I:
a) determine somebody's age from their SSN
b) determine if the parent's SSN supplied is really the parent's SSN
c) tell if somebody's using a forged SSN

2. I don't have a US-issued SSN. How do I sign up to a service using this scheme?

Re:It can be done

[Dragonslicer]

1. I'm not familiar with the scheme, but how do I:
a) determine somebody's age from their SSN
b) determine if the parent's SSN supplied is really the parent's SSN
c) tell if somebody's using a forged SSN

That's easy, just ask the government. The site can send the federal government the Social Security number you gave them and the full name of the person setting up the account. The government knows the birth date of the owner of that SSN and the names of any dependents, so that takes care of a) and b). As for forgery or the child just using their parent's name and number, also include some other identifying information of some sort that only the person would know. See, that isn't too hard, is it?

"omg are you serious?" replies in 3, 2, 1...

Re:It can be done

[julesh]

That's easy, just ask the government. The site can send the federal government the Social Security number you gave them and the full name of the person setting up the account. The government knows the birth date of the owner of that SSN and the names of any dependents, so that takes care of a) and b). As for forgery or the child just using their parent's name and number, also include some other identifying information of some sort that only the person would know. See, that isn't too hard, is it?

"omg are you serious?" replies in 3, 2, 1...

Hold on... do you mean to say that the US government will hand out your personal information to anyone who knows your SSN?

Re:It can be done

[EmperorKagato]

2. I don't have a US-issued SSN. How do I sign up to a service using this scheme?

The way things are going, you may have an identifier soon enough.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[spyder913]

Because those activities have to be done in person, and it makes it easy to verify they are or are not of age (fake IDs of course causing some problems). This means they are actually enforcible. On the net, there is no real way to duplicate that age verification.

Right to teach

[The Monster]

How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?

When they pick up weapons and try to translate that philosophy into reality, we'll just have to kill them. Meanwhile, we'll muddle through under this wacky idea that parents are presumed to have the best interests of their children at heart, and understand that hate mongers from Westboro to Wahhabi are the price of religious freedom.

Asprin?

[Irvu]

Where and when was a law passed mandating that parental consent was required for Asprin? This isn't the same mythical set of laws that also bans prayer in schools and mandates that all teenagers play violent video games is it? Is it Federal? State? Local to idiotville?

Re:Asprin?

[Skadet]

I'm about to run out the door from work, but the best I could find on Google in the 5 seconds I had was this, from Bedford County Public Schools' P&P Manual:

Students with a diagnosis of asthma are permitted to possess and self-administer inhaled asthma medications in accordance with this policy during the school day, at school-sponsored activities, or while on a school bus or other school property. In order for a student to possess and self-administer asthma medication, the following conditions must be met:

*written parental consent that the student may self-administer inhaled asthma medications must be on file with the school; [snip]

Not Asprin, but you might think that possession of an inhaler is de facto evidence of need... it isn't as if you can get high off one.

Re:Asprin?

[rkanodia]

it isn't as if you can get high off one.

You knew the wrong kids in junior high.

Re:Asprin?

[Irvu]

That is interesting but that raises another interesting point. Strictly speaking that isn't "the law" in that it was set or is administered by courts, except in cases of civil challenge. Practically speaking it affects the students in the same way but it wasn't established by politicians in any capitol or subjected to a vote nor is it something that gets challenged by legislative candidates. Commenting that it is "the law" and putting it on par with the proposed statewide legislation is entirely illogical in my opinion.

I find this occurs a great deal with accusations of government overreaching. One school teacher somewhere says that students shouldn't pray in her class (which is patently unconstitutional) and then people are flinging around the idea that "the law" bans prayer in schools so we need to exercise our Second Amendment rights. And we're off the loony races.

Your link I notice talks about prescription meds. I would imagine that the requirement is there to ensure that they don't get sued for not taking enough care to "protect" kids. Basic paranoia, the hallmark of underfunded school districts.

But then again the other responder is right, you did know the wrong kids in Jr High :)

Your Rights Online eh?

[twbecker]

I don't think many minors are reading /. I'm not saying I would necessarily support the legislation, but parents absolutely need access to online content posted by their children. I question how the requirement to have parental permission would be enforced, but again in theory it's not such a bad idea IMO. We're not talking about adults here, and the reality is that until you're 18, your parents determine what rights they think you should have and which you shouldn't.

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[YrWrstNtmr]

I don't think many minors are reading /.

More than zero.

I'm not saying I would necessarily support the legislation, but parents absolutely need access to online content posted by their children.

Right. And as a parent, that is up to ME to determine how that is done.

I question how the requirement to have parental permission would be enforced, but again in theory it's not such a bad idea IMO.

Ok...you as an adult...how do YOU prove you're not a child trying to log on or create a website?

We're not talking about adults here, and the reality is that until you're 18, your parents determine what rights they think you should have and which you shouldn't.

Exactly. Parents determine...

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I think children should be afforded as many rights and privileges as we can possibly confer upon them without compromising their safety. (Children are people too.)

Children have a right to privacy, including writing their deepest, darkest secrets into a journal (or online equivalent) without fear of others prying into their affairs.

These rights should only be waived when a clear and present danger to their safety has been identified.

Just my opinion, of course.

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[twbecker]

I never said zero minor read the site. Also, you're making this out to be an issue of the gov't trying to get between you and your child. This simply states that you will have the opportunity to review your child's online content. It doesn't confer onto you an obligation to do it, again that's between the parent and the child.

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[Oracle of Bandwidth]

The "Parents need access to online content posted by their children" is a meme I've heard repeated maybe 4 times in the last seven days. Is that really true? Are lock makers obligated to provide you with a copy of a key your child uses to lock up a journal?

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[twbecker]

Are lock makers obligated to provide you with a copy of a key your child uses to lock up a journal?

They don't need to. I can grab some bolt cutters and say screw the lock. Would I? It depends on how my relationship with my son develops (I'm not too worried about my 2 year old at the moment). But the point is I can. That's kinda hard with a website I don't have access to. I don't live in Georgia, so I don't have a dog in this fight; it just seems to me that a lot of the people who reject this notion out of hand aren't parents.

Re:Your Rights Online eh?

[hrvatska]

I've raised children, and I oppose this legislation. Just as I would oppose legislation that gave me a right to see every book my child looked withdrew from the library or bought from a book sellar.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[tyrr]

The fuss is about hypocrisy.
The State Senate of Georgia is once again making a fool of itself by showing everyone that they have nothing better to do. Oh well... It's Georgia. KKK must be still alive and kicking there.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[sidz1979]

Kids (depending on age) can not drive, buy tobacco and alcohol, open bank accounts, stay out late, or marry without legal guardians' consent. Heck -- a few months before birth they can even be killed by their mothers (with doctors assistance). So, what's the fuss about restricting their on-line socializing?

I guess the difference here is that the all of the entities involved in these actions (the parents, the alcohol/tobacco store owner, bank manager) are in the same state/city/town as the minor. But in case of a website, there is no way to enforce such a law if the website is based off-shore. The law just seems more over-reaching and unenforceable.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

This means they are actually enforcible. On the net, there is no real way to duplicate that age verification.

That's a potential problem with implementation. But something tells me, even if a way to verify the age was found, you (and most of the rest of /.-tters) would not approve of the measure...

local or global

[Marxist Hacker 42]

it also represents the battle between local control and global networking. Does this guy really think his brilliant law enacted in Georgia will be enforcable against, say, a social networking site in California?

Re:local or global

[myowntrueself]

Does this guy really think his brilliant law enacted in Georgia will be enforcable against, say, a social networking site in California?

Maybe the legislature in Georgia is really naive (or conceited) and thinks that all the social networking sites on teh interwebs are in located in Georgia?

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

WTF is the connection between KKK and helping parents control their children's activities?

It's HIGHLY impractical!

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, just HOW do you get their parent to make an account? And exactly what, if anything, can you do about all the minors pretending to be adults?

That's right, nothing. That, or you kill off all free services just because the parents can't keep track of their kids and are pushing the responsibility over to third parties.

Besides, why can't the PARENT force the kids to give up their account password if it's such a concern? Don't they have any authority over the children? I can't see this, as is, leading to anything but them shutting down or giving passwords to pretty much anyone who claims to be the parent of someone else. And I should *hope* you know why that's stupid.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[cdrguru]

Why did you feel it was necessary to add "(with doctors assistance)"? Women since the beginning of time have found ways to deal with inconvenient pregnancies. Yes, horseback riding is out of favor right now as are coathangers, but they have been used in the past.

While it might be considered somewhat safer for the woman concerned to have a pregnancy terminated with medical assistance, be assured that "safer" hasn't always been a primary concern. Getting rid of the damned thing has often been the only concern.

The one thing that should not get too far away from the whole abortion/baby killing/euthansia debate is where there is a will, there is a way. It will be done by desparate people in what they consider to be desperate circumstances. Medical supervision is absolutely not required.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a rambling post, because I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Personally, I think us geeks in general get annoyed at internet/computer censorship because it's our domain. The consumers of mass media - consisting here of broadcast media - don't share our values. For them, a computer is a toy or possibly a tool. They can play flash games on them. Or play whack-a-popup. Or look up television listings, then go watch television. And those people want censorship. Fine. More power to them. That's why there are no nipples on broadcast TV: people, by and large, don't want them.

But here's the thing. The internet is not theirs. It's our domain, it's what separates us from them. We see computers as tools first, communications devices second, and then toys somewhere around 14th. They care as much about the speed of a clock cycle as I do about nipples on their TVs. But see, I don't try and tell them what they can watch on their TVs - it's their TV, right? Their time to lose.

But it's my computer. It's my ethernet cable and it's our - meaning, geeks', internet. The mass media was built by mass culture, but the internet was built by geek culture. And now that mass culture has decided they like MySpace and Ponies and pretty cursors, they're telling us they don't want nipples on their screens - which is a proxy for their true meaning, which is that they don't want it on our internet.

That's one way I see it. Another is that geeks typically start as geeks pretty young. We probably all saw goatse at an age that was far below what would have been "appropriate." The only real way to keep the early-to-mid teenage budding geeks from seeing the goatses of the world would be to lock down the internet - to now allow for the exploration and discovery that, frankly, is the thing that made computers interesting in the first place. A computer is something where you can go as far as the network will let you, and that's pretty far. Contrast that with broadcast media: you see only what someone else has already decided is interesting for you, and appropriate for you. Goatse would never get onto network television. Neither would the sitcom equivalent of nmap, linux, or SSH. The only thing on television is the one-way equivalent of trivial flash games.

See, we don't really care about the kid who gets on the computer to punch the monkey instead of watching nickelodeon or (*shudder*) the O.C. We oppose the locking down and de-imaginification of the internet for our younger analogs - for the script kiddies we pretend we weren't a few years ago. If they are really going to be kept from the goatses and tubgirls of the world, they're gonna have to be kept away from IRC, the glorious text file archives, and all the other "interesting" stuff on on the internet. It's not the children we're worried about - it's the future geeks of 2020.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[tyrr]

Do you seriously think that this law will help parents control their children?
I think the only issue here is a greedy state senator who wants immortalize her name in a meaningless law.

MOD PARENT UP!

[4e617474]

If there were a "+1 Obvious, but needed saying that badly" this would be the time

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

Do you seriously think that this law will help parents control their children?

No, first you have to answer, why you brought up the "KKK" and "hypocrisy"...

I think the only issue here is a greedy state senator [...]

And "greed".

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

Why did you feel it was necessary to add "(with doctors assistance)"?

To make it easier to understand, what I'm talking about. You may be right in that I may have made it too distracting from the point I was actually making.

I did and still do try to avoid expressing my own point of view on the subject here so as to avoid topic-changing. For this reason, I shall not respond on the matter in this thread again.

Parental Responsibility

[fireslack]

I think everyone needs to step back and realize that you can't substitute parental supervision and responsibility with legislation. As long as Mom and Dad aren't looking, he kids will find ways to get into all sorts of trouble.

More restrictive they get the more they want it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with law like this is the more restrictive the law get against them the more they want to challenge it. It is strange in our society that we praise and love the law breakers so these laws are essentially useless against the people we write the laws for. In short we punish the good guys which most of the time follow the law and we restrict with laws but the bad guys don't care what laws we write and make a mockery of us.
The real problem is we don't enforce the laws on the bad guys and run amok of our society.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[tyrr]

I brought up hypocrisy because out of all important issues (crime, poverty, education, war, health care, etc.) your senator elected to work on a meaningless law (unenforceable and unsuccessful).
I brought up KKK because the only goal of this law is to instate fear. Sounds familiar or should I continue? Witch hunt continues. New enemies of Georgia are people who teach the theory of evolution and create community web sites.
As far as senator's true inspirations I can think of only two: greed or stupidity. Any which way, Georgia's state taxes can be spent a whole lot better.

Ah - Life in Good Ol' Georgia!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this the same state that put a teenager in prison for 10 years for getting a blowjob?

Someone save me

[fabu10u$]

I really want to move out of this God-forsaken place (Atlanta), but right now I would have to take a loss to sell my condo...

The Hell?

[Torvaun]

So you would advocate removing children from their parents custody based on the beliefs of the parents in question? And you would, of course, allow the government to decide which are 'good beliefs' and which are 'criminal beliefs'? And, being as this is a land where governments can change radically between two four year terms, you would acknowledge that every possible president and congress will not abuse this power over the formative years of all the children of the state of Georgia, and potentially the nation if this kind of thing makes it into federal law? Now, which part of my statement disagrees with anything you said, or does not logically follow from prior statements?

Familiar?

[vinividivici]

Please enter your credit card number so we can "verify your age." It's a trap!

GA Politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you haven't lived here very long.A lot of those Republicans-including the Governor-used to be Democrats.
They saw the electoral changes trending Republican and "switched " parties so they could remain in leadership positions.
The minority party has no power in the GA legislature so yeah in that sense they are behaving like the Republicans used to.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

I brought up hypocrisy because out of all important issues (crime, poverty, education, war, health care, etc.)

Oh, yeah, that's right — as long as there is a single sick person in the world, nothing else should be done by anyone but treat her/him, right? Why are you posting to /. instead of working on an AIDS-vaccine, hypocrite?

I brought up KKK because the only goal of this law is to instate fear.

Bullshit. It does not instate fear. It tries to logically extend control, that parents already have over their kids social lives into the Internet realm.

As far as senator's true inspirations I can think of only two: greed or stupidity.

Your manners make me think, you simply fear the power, this law might give to your parents :-)

Stupid idea

[alexjohnc3]

First of all, how in the world is an idiot like this the head of the Science and Technology Committee? We've already got Ted Stevens (the tubes guy), but this is just pathetic.

Secondly, the government should stop trying to control the internets. Even if there is an incredibly small minority of MySpace users who have had something illegal done to them (as pointed out here), because of their own stupidity, that doesn't mean they can take away someone's right to make a website that allows people to join regardless of age (as long as the website doesn't have illegal content that is put there by those in charge of the website). Thanks to the Internet younger people have been able to freely express themselves, but since they have no say in government and can't vote they will have that taken away from them. Age doesn't determine intelligence or maturity, regardless of the stereotypes people may have of children. For those that do want to censor the Internet "for" their children: good for them, let them buy software that prevents their kids from going on the "bad" sites. That's why that software exists in the first place. The government shouldn't even be able to stop people from creating websites that have perfect legal content just because some parents are too lazy to keep their kids from looking at pr0n or get some software to stop them from doing whatever it is they want to do (censorship's fine if it's for the children!).

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[Saxerman]

So, what's the fuss about restricting [kids] on-line socializing? It is not like their real-life socializing is not already restricted (and always has been)...

The trouble with requiring legal authorization for anything is that those who don't have it will find ways around it, and those who do have it will now be hassled to prove it. Strangely, all security restrictions seem to work that way.... Thusly, when "think of the children" protections are put into place, they have a funny way to affecting those who are not children.

Meet your internet boltcutter!

[Darlantan]

Ever heard of a 'keylogger'?

A Revolutionary New Treatment

[kbolino]

It is NOT the government's job to be the parent. If you do not know what your kids are doing and how they are doing it, it is YOUR FAULT, not THEIRS, nor ANYONE ELSE'S. That is, you are responsible for monitoring your children. MySpace does not need to provide a "back door" for parents--they have every right to march right in the front door. If your child does not allow you to view their online activity, then you punish him/her. This doesn't have to be violent--not that a little smack would hurt--but it needs to get the point across. Set boundaries and enforce them. Stop whining and DO SOMETHING.

Sounds f-ed up

[smartr]

It would not surpise me if Georgia would claim jursidiction because it is a service offered to people living in Georgia - reguardless of what state you're in. Perhaps the correct responce would be to block IP addresses in Georgia and not let people in Georgia use a "social networking site". I mean, what qualifies something as a "social networking site" when it comes to the law? Sure you look at myspace, and think, well might as well have them burn, but take a site like LiveJournal... Its intent does not really match that of a "social networking site", but it could arguably be one. Or take it a step further, how different is hosting a website with a search feature built in? IANAL, but I imagine that it could be argued down unconstitutional. I think it is reasonable to say that communicating in a forum through a social networking site is free speech. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there is a federal law that requires the law to be enforced equally across the board, so it should also say kids can't use e-mail, google, or really do anything on the internet without parental permission...

Re:Sounds f-ed up

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot. There's nothing wrong with Myspace except for the fact that all you sloppy, disgusting nerds get your friend requests rejected or are too afraid to sign up in fear of being humiliated by having 10 friends and having your co-workers laugh at you once they find your page. You think LiveJournal is more mature than Myspace? You must be the fucking clown of the internet. 6Apart is a piece of shit and pretty much all LJ users cry and whine 24/7 and scream for attention at every chance they get.

Re:Sounds f-ed up

[smartr]

Hello Troll, howdydoooo While I'll admit everyone and their mother is on myspace, they're running on an insecure, spam laden, ad laden, and unreliable heap of garbage running under the massive media bandwagon of Rupert Murdock. It reminds me alot of AOL... With lots of music... Which YouTube is arguably a better medium for... While facebook is a better medium for networking now that they finally got on the bandwagon of opening up. Myspace needs a complete overhaul. Besides being an excellent RSS reader and RSS feed, lj will actually let you use it for free without ads.

Downtime

[Anonymous Coward]

require parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony

Soooo... The second time your server goes down it's a felony? That's harsh.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

Strangely, all security restrictions seem to work that way.... Thusly, when "think of the children" protections are put into place, they have a funny way to affecting those who are not children.

Well, you seem to reject all other restrictions placed on the younger citizens by our (and all other, BTW) society. Thus you don't really qualify for the condition spelled out in the subject-line of my first posting in this thread: "If we accept restrictions on children in general..."

You should not have responded at all...

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[account_deleted]

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Why not just use an existing law?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm not mistaken, minors cannot enter into a legally binding contract. It used to be common to see prize giveaways, waivers, and other such things required the children to get their parents signature or stipulated that you must be 18 years and older. Hence, any EULA that sites such as myspace puts forth cannot be agreed to by minors. Therefore, minors cannot participate in such sites without the consent of their parents.

"I agree"

[It's a thing]

How will putting a little button that says "I and my parents agree to the above conditions" stop sex offenders on social networks any more than "I agree" buttons on nonfree software when the EULA comes up prevent sharing?

Re:"I agree"

[Anonymous Coward]

No joke.
A law that states "it's the company's fault" and then gives no direction as to HOW they are supposed to accomplish this. Its technologically impossible. Your best bet would be to require a credit card to sign-up, and even then plenty of kids can get their hands on credit cards without their parents knowing.

This is the same state...

[HangingChad]

The same state that:

• Tried to segregate a concert...by Ray Charles
• Voted for George Bush...twice
• Just put a guy away for 10 years for getting a blow job that he didn't even initiate

ROFL! Georgia, Kansas and Alabama will be competing in a reality show to select the dumbest state in the union. Call in and vote for your favorite!

what's a minor anyway?

[c6gunner]

The big problem with you yanks is that you can't seem to make up your mind about what a minor is in the first place. Age of consent laws vary from state to state but are generally 17-18. But you let them drive when they're 16. But they can't buy alcohol until they're 21. But they can use a gun as soon as they're old enough to hold it. None of it makes the least bit of sense. And you're not alone in that; here in Canada we're almost as bad. In the end though, how can you protect minors when you can't even figure out what a minor IS?

Re:what's a minor anyway?

[porcupine8]

Age of majority/consent laws are such a mess. 19-year-olds are mature enough to vote and risk their lives defending our country, but not mature enough to drink a beer? And people who apparently *aren't* mature enough to cast a vote yet, are legally allowed to engage in activity that could result in their being completely responsible for the life of another human being.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[JoshJ]

You hit the nail square on the head. It's a shame we can't explain it to the politicians that way. After all, they think the tubes belong to them.

Conjecture

[StrangeCargoFromKeyL]

Right now, I'd venture to say (read: totally blind-guessing here) that roughly 33% of deadly malicious beastghosts are computer-savvy (not to mention sane) enough to get on a computer and find some prey to victimize. It stands to reason that in the coming years, that percentage will rise as more Americans who grew up wrangling computers come of age... which translates to: a higher percentage of our nation's raving degenerate lunatics who are totally computer savvy. This techno-savvy wave of deranged folks will make the internet wilder, woolier, and more every-man-for-himself than ever before...

Which brings me to my point:
Networked youngun's shouldn't be sheltered from the very thing they need seared into their instincts: defensive surfing.

-Daniel

(2nd /. post ever, first 'serious' one, go easy, and please appraise of any glaring etiquette errors/faux pas...)

_______________
The site I've been working on for four months just went live!

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[account_deleted]

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Why is this needed?

[riceboy50]

There are already laws that are intended to protect children from entering personal information into web sites. Have a look at COPPA. Whether or not you find these types of laws effective does not change the fact that new ones won't help the situation.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[hrvatska]

A lot of people consider this the equivalent of requiring written parental permission for children to play at the park. Myspace is probably safer than the park for a lot of children, but no one seems to be proposing that all minors have permission to visist the park. And implementation is not a potential problem, it makes this a non-starter more than anything else. Post after post is hammering away on that theme. Why even push this legislation if there is no practical way to implement it? And speaking as a parent who has raised children to adulthood, I oppose this legislation because I don't think every little activity my children engaged in needed my signed consent. While raising children, I would have opposed a requirement for validated parental permission (and that's what this legislation is proposing) to go to the park, the library, school dances, football games, basketball games, and on and on and on. I would oppose legislation that gave parents permission to know about every book their children takes out of the library or purchases from a book seller. This is a useless piece of legislation, by a self inflating blow hard. It does nothing to protect children and unnecessarily interferes with my rights as a parent to raise my children in a way that I think produces motivated and self reliant individuals. I don't think it's necessary that every parent be notified, and have to give permission, for every piddly little activity their children engage in. And yes, I do think myspace falls into the category of piddly activities.

Look at me, look at me

[Speed Pour]

This is just another senator trying to make his name known.

We've seen bills like this introduced time and time again over Copyrights (in music, movies, software, etc.), Patents, Spam, Pornography, and even Politics (the blogger registration from 2 weeks ago). Each time, one political fruitcake either listens to an ill-informed adviser or simply gets the idea to go overboard for the sake of being the first guy to show "he cares". The problem comes from the fact that the politician doesn't understand the subject, and operate on what their equally ignorant subordinates tell them.

As a result of this, they introduce a bill that dramatically overshoots the mark. Most of the time they get stomped (like the blogger registration) and occasionally they get through (anyone say DMCA?)

This law will get stomped for a series of reasons. Not least of which is the extremely severe measures. Additional problem that will certainly be a breaking point, unless I misread, I believe that "social networking" could possibly be interpreted to include any site that supports account-based forums, even including slashdot.

Here's a simple solution. All of that watchdog software that parents are supposed to have on their computers and schools are supposed to install...Well, let's just add Myspace and Facebook to it. Clearly, the parental tools myspace offers and the watchdog software that theoretically prevents kids from getting to sites without parental permission should make it possible to have fair and reasonable monitoring.

We don't need a legal solution to this "problem", we need to apply the technology we already have and get over it. There's nothing about this problem that requires a solution any different from porn sites...the kids just have to click the button saying "I'm Over 18" and the parents will never be the wiser...but if you block the site from the start, the problem goes away.

Politically Incorrect

[StikyPad]

I realize I may be alone here, but I'm sick and tired of Georgians proposing social sites, and I'm all for placing restrictions on them!

Cecil Stanton and bad legislation

[JimBobJoe]

This is the second time that Cecil Stanton's name has been associated with strange legislation.

He is the sponsor of a bill which would amend the state constitution to allow for photo ID requirements on election day.

While I understand that reasonable people will disagree with this, Georgia has lost twice in court now on this issue, and the amendment will not likely change that. What I don't understand is why they are so desperate that they need to amend the state constitution.

It seems like every state legislature has at least one guy who puts up the most moronic legislation possible. Perhaps the legislation is introduced by someone who has no change of losing an election.

I may be in the minority here, but...

[Goldenhawk]

I may be in the minority here, but I do have kids. When my 9-year old discovers whatever passes for MySpace at the time we begin to give him access to the web, he's not going to be using it independently of the direct oversight of my wife and myself. He won't be freely using any other web site, for that matter. His right to absolute privacy begins only when he moves out of my house, 9 years from now. If he insists that he is not going to tell me his password, I expect we'll start taking away privileges such as his internet access; if he insists on abusing our trust by using such sites outside our home, other privileges will begin disappearing accordingly.

This is no different than our current approach to discipline (which by the way is apparently working well): his rights currently extend only to being fed and clothed and healthy. His privileges (including toys, visits with friends, computer games, television, etc.) are given in direct proportion to his responsibility. As he acts responsibly, they expand. As he abuses our trust, they contract until he rebuilds our trust.

You may ask, how will you monitor his activities away from home? Naturally we're still figuring that out, but we already have a good start when he visits friends' houses, where he already knows that we expect him to follow our home's rules. For example, he knows (and obeys) our restrictions on what television he may watch, or video games he may play; we verify his obedience with parents. I expect our monitoring will include frequent vanity-Googling-by-proxy - searching for his name, and seeing what pops up. I also expect it will include a healthy dose of two-way trust. He already knows that he can trust us, and that we have his best interests in mind, and we will work together with him to build an appropriate presence online, as part of his responsible upbringing. As attentive parents, I also fully expect that we'll have a very good idea of his avatar choices and will be able to find them on any popular sites. Furthermore, since his rights to privacy don't yet exist, we will not hesitate to install keylogging and screenshot software on his computer, which will continue to live only in the common family room, will continue to be locked to system changes, and let him know that we monitor everything he does - just like we already often listen to his phone calls with less-responsible friends, and we make sure both parties know that we're listening. This is all part of parenting. I would never turn him loose in a city by himself, and letting him loose online is no different.

I'm quite certain that this post will generate some "are you nuts" or "what kind of fanatic are you" replies. Yes, I am a fanatic, in that I'm absolutely convinced of my beliefs (including trusting that God will change my mind if I'm wrong). I am raising my children according to my own beliefs, and teaching them everything I believe, because honestly, if I didn't believe it enough to pass it on to my most dearly valued family, that would show that I didn't really believe it.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Trillian_1138]

I would never turn him loose in a city by himself, and letting him loose online is no different.

I agree, but only to some extent. Online activities can be dangerous (ranging from potential child molesters as discussed in this article to 'accidentally' buying something with mom or dad's credit card) but you can't get jumped, beaten, and robbed (or raped, or killed) on a dangerous website. Again, I am not saying the Internet is without dangers for kids, just that they are different dangers (and different magnitudes of danger) than in the 'real' world.

That said, I would agree a 9-year-old probably isn't mature enough to be granted completely unmonitored Internet activity. (Of course, it's easy for me to make parenting decisions, having no children.) I'm just curious at what point you plan to start letting go of that control. This is honest curiosity, although I do have what I think is a pretty good 'right' answer in mind.

(tongue-in-cheek)Well, since you asked, I'll share my thoughts.(tongue-in-cheek) I'm young enough to have had most of my 'formative years' (middle school and high school) with an Internet connection and email and felt my parents gave me freedom to use those in line with other freedoms. When my grades were good, I was going to bed on time, and there weren't any other problems, I had relatively free use of the computer with little supervision. In my mind, it would be like opening your child's mail or checking every book he or she purchases - at a young age that may be appropriate, and may be appropriate at an older age circumstances depending, but becomes less and less so (especially if there are no other issues with behavior/grades/etc).

It sounds like you'll probably agree (at least mostly) I'm just checking to make sure you acknowledge that even if you feel the same legal responsibility toward a child of 9 and a child of 17, they are different creatures and should have different privileges and privacies accordingly.

Sorry to sound like a 'backseat parent,' particularly because I don't have any kids. I just feel strongly that, if a child seems to be handling themselves maturely, they should be granted freedom and privacy to go along with that maturity (but obviously only to a certain extent).

-Trillian

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when your son turns 18 and does everything he can to raise money so he can move out of your draconian, totalitarian household, maybe, just maybe, you'll realize that you made his childhood nothing short of a miserable existence. If I was your son, I'd kill myself. Have you ever thought to yourself, "if I was raised by my parents the way I'm raising my son, would I be the person I am today?" The answer is probably not.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[JoshJ]

Congrats, you're a fascist parent. While your attitude is arguably correct for a 9-year old, it is beyond inappropiate once your child enters high school. If my parents tried pulling that level of bullshit on me, they'd find every computer in the household wiped clean. Of everything. I strongly suspect you're already not raising a child, but brainwashing one. Considering what you said about your religion, I already know you're a large part of the problem with this country.

In short,
Fuck you.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Urinal Deuce]

...a healthy dose of two-way trust...

Real trust is when you don't need detective work to confirm that everything your child says is true.

Speaking from experience (at age 19), the invasion of your privacy feels equally violating when perpetrated by parents as anyone else. Although I know my parents had my best interests at heart, I also recognized that my beliefs contradicted theirs. Arguing proved ineffective, so I learned to keep secrets and lie to them. That lesson only lead to unhappiness and distrust on both ends.

Trust also requires you to listen to your child. Nothing magical changes on the 18th birthday, before which one is still a real person with needs of their own. An attentive parent can discern such needs from the noise. Otherwise, your fanaticism may beget inverse fanaticism in your child, as it did in me.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you truly believe that Googling his name on a regular basis, keeping up-to-date lists of all his avatars and passwords, keylogging everything he does, and making it impossible for him to manipulate a computer system directly in any way bears any relation whatsoever to the word or concept of "trust", I think I would find it exceptionally interesting to hear what measures you would consider to be distrustful, much less pathologically or unreasonably paranoid.

I'll just have to make sure the conversation is encrypted - wouldn't want one of the aides of Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listening in and taking notes.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Doctor Faustus]

I may be in the minority here, but I do have kids. When my 9-year old discovers whatever passes for MySpace at the time we begin to give him access to the web, he's not going to be using it independently of the direct oversight of my wife and myself.
I have a nine-year old son, too. You really give him no web access whatsoever? Adrian uses Miriam Webster's site for his spelling/vocabulary homework, and he enjoys PBS Kids and Nickelodean's web sites as well as Kitten War, Two Lumps (web comic about two cats -- a few aren't 100% appropriate, but I'm willing to talk those over with him), and the occasional article about Star Wars or YouTube video that I show him because I think he'll like it. Kids legally can't create accounts on sites that require logins until they're 13; we'll see what Adrian's like by then, but that seems like a fairly reasonable age to start allowing a little privacy. It's not like he can't say things I might not like to his friends through other methods.

will continue to be locked to system changes
Good luck. There's still too much software that needs to be on an administrator account to run, especially games. Of course, the way his Sims keep starving to death bothers me a lot more than anything I've seen him look for on the internet.

Yes, I am a fanatic, in that I'm absolutely convinced of my beliefs (including trusting that God will change my mind if I'm wrong).
That last bit is really something you'd be better off keeping to yourself if you want anyone to listen to you.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's pretty obvious that this post is a troll/flamebait. No parent would really restrict freedom that much, they're just asking for a reblellion. Hmm my verifcation word is "Denying", how appropriate.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[rkd2110]

I would never turn him loose in a city by himself, and letting him loose online is no different.

One question - How is it not different? Do you think your child will be hit by a virtual car, while crossing a virtual road? Or do you think that he will be molested on the internet itself?

I agree that your beliefs are yours to hold and adhere. Non the less, after reading the above, I can confidently say that you are a FUCKING INSANE MANIAC, who causes much more harm to his child then any TV show or website could ever dream of.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Dragonslicer]

If my parents tried pulling that level of bullshit on me, they'd find every computer in the household wiped clean. Of everything.

And you'd find your ass grounded for at least a couple months and probably wouldn't see a computer again until you moved out. Funny how that works, huh?

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the AC but at work so...

You definitely seem to be a parent who monitors with his child's best interest at heart but to my way of thinking your methods have a very harmful side effect. You child will grow up believing that he has no right to privacy. When the government wants to install cameras in his house when he grows up he's not going to say a word against it. I applaud that you let you child know he's being watched but the fact of the matter is if all the decisions he's making are under your direct observation then those decisions are not made without your influence. You cannot observe a situation without affecting it, particularly if the observed is aware of the observer.

A question I pose to you, you indicated that as he acts in a responsible manner his privileges are expanded. Does this include privacy? When he's 16 will you say to him, "you know what, you've been using the internet for years now and you've never given us a reason not to trust you, so you know what, no need to tell us next time you change your hotmail password."

Parents are a metaphor for authority figures weather we like it or not. We think we're different because we love our children where in the real world the authority figures don't have the same benevolence. I for one look forward to when my children tell me that I'm doing something unfair and that I have no right to do it. That doesn't necessarily mean they're right or that I'll agree but that will demonstrate that my child knows that his rights don't begin and end at what rights I give him.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[fair_n_hite_451]

And you'll have raised someone who sees authority figures as people who do not have his best interests at heart, but are more concerned about power and control.
 
Funny how that works, huh?

Captcha for this post ... "lashings". How appropriate.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[syntaxglitch]

If my parents tried pulling that level of bullshit on me, they'd find every computer in the household wiped clean. Of everything.

And you'd find your ass grounded for at least a couple months and probably wouldn't see a computer again until you moved out. Funny how that works, huh? Creating more resentment and more motivation for the child to lie to and rebel against his parents, leading to ever greater retribution from the parents, in a repeating cycle of escalation. Then the kid hits 18, moves out, probably screws up his life because he was never taught to be independent and responsible for himself, and barely speaks to his parents again. For the next ten years his mother occasionally cries herself to sleep because she doesn't know why her son hates her.

And then, whose fault will it be in the end, for not being mature enough to stop the destructive pattern?

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[FourDegreez]

"if he insists on abusing our trust by ..."

Um. What trust? You think you're demonstrating trust with that type of parenting? You aren't. You think he won't know that you're snooping on what he does outside the home? He will. You think he won't resent being allowed zero privacy? He will. I see no "trust" in your plan, at all.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

You're not being an authoritative parent. You're being an authoritarian one. There's a substantial difference.

It's true. You do have to put your foot down. You do have to set limits. And you do have to keep your eye on them. But you should never forget that all the while, you are raising them so that eventually you won't have to do all that anymore.

It's very ironic that the very time most parents should be relaxing retrictions and allowing more autonomy, the teenage years, is the time that many parents instead choose to increase retrictions and oversight. At the time when they should be discussing things with their children and also listening to their opinions, many parents choose instead to insist on absolute obedience and dismiss their near-adults views. Sometimes they are even well meaning, but this is all what is referred to in software quality circles as "A Failure of Process".

Don't let your processes be a failure. Make them a success.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Key logging and screenshot software? No internet access at 9 years old? You don't mention how you monitor all of your child's activity at school. Is s/he home schooled? It wouldn't surprise me if that were true. I think you'll find as the child grows older and sees that you have no trust in them (whether you tell the child you do or not is irrelevant, the child knows you monitor ALL aspects of their life so they think you don't trust their decisions or actions, etc) they will learn to lie to you, to hide things and to do both *very* well. When they finally escape your grasp (the child *will* see it as escaping your grasp) and move out of your home the first thing they're going to do is all the things you've prevented them for doing. If not all, then some. Their ability to make rational decisions is going to be hindered by that fact that all their previous decisions were always influenced by your ever present ears or eyes. Growing up is learning, and a child needs to learn EVERYTHING, including what it's like to have *REAL* privacy. Parent or not, when you listen to conversations, read email, watch EVERY activity and all the other associated things you are spying. Sounds to me like you've already applied the wedge, just keep on hammering.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[UltimApe]

what a draconian system, i bet your kid revolts, drops out of school, and hates you for not trusting him at all... worse yet the kid will develope a low self esteem and get bought up by a roaming physchopath the miniute he/she leaves your "guideing hand" (cuz, that what that manson guy did).

all jokes aside; do you admit to your own falibility? if you are doing something unfairly, does the kid have a chance of changing your mind? or are you going to tell him "because I said so" or even worse "because it's gods will", and dogmatically refuse all attempts at approching your reason. There is none a better way to cause a child to loath you, or god, or both, than being unreasonable.

God can never change your mind if you don't keep it open.

I relate this funny joke to you: (replace save, with change mind, and drowning, with raising child, and you might see what i'm talking about.)

----

"A devout Christian was on a sinking boat praying to God to save him.

An hour later a large fishing boat came by and asked if he wanted to come on board.

'No', he said. 'My Lord will save me'.

Two hours later another boat passed and tried to help.

But the Man said 'God will save me'.

Three hours later a helicopter flew by and offered him help.

Again the Man refused. 'God will not let me down'.

The Man died. When he went through the Pearly Gates he said 'My Lord. Why didn't you save me'.

God said 'I did. I sent you two boats and a helicopter. But you've got to work with me'."

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the question is, will you grant your child more freedom as they show responsibility and rational thinking? Or will you keep him/her under constant guard until 18? If it's the former I just think you're overreating a bit. If it's the latter however... well I hope you enjoy drama.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. What a Nazi. No, sorry. Comparing you to the Nazis would be insulting to the Nazis.

Re:I may be in the minority here, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of a metaphor for US foreign policy then. Maybe the kid will grow up to be prez.

Parental Rights

[DeadManCoding]

As a father who just deleted the step-daughter's MySpace account and revoked priviledges to the step-son, I'm feeling inclined to offer my 2 cents here. In order to start a MySpace account, you need an email address. Any child can do that, free providers are everywhere. You can also browse MySpace to look for anyone, including your children if they're sneaky. MySpace does not need additional parental controls, it needs additional parents to monitor their children.

As far as a children's rights, they extend only so far as to prevent abuse in any way shape or form. After all, the step-son broke something at school. Guess who's paying for it? Sure as hell isn't him. After all, ultimate responsibility falls on me and their mother to ensure that they become (relatively) productive and contributing members of society. When the kids are online, they know that they have no expectations of privacy. At my house, internet and computer usage is a priviledge, not a right. It's a priviledge that can be removed at any time, for whatever reasons we (mother and I) choose. Now, I'm not going to cut off MySpace because something got broken at school, but I will cut off access if the children abuse the priviledge.

Case in point: step-daughter was being pissy and started to become disrespectful towards her mother while engaging with another pre-teen on MySpace. For that, priviledges was revoked with a quick changed password. After all, we set up the accounts and the email addresses for them. Once she learned how to change the password back again using her email address, the email address and MySpace passwords were changed for going behind our backs. Afterwards, she decided to use her brother's account to talk to all her friends on MySpace. A day later, account was deleted, and brother's MySpace password was changed. When said brother couldn't use MySpace, we sat down with both of them and explained what all was done and why.

Introducing additional restrictions will not solve the problem at hand. If said parents aren't monitoring their children already, additional legislature won't force them to start monitoring. It's up to the parents to ensure that their children aren't posting sexual material online, or acting in any sort of immoral way, racism, etc. You may not agree with our disciplinary actions, but no one can tell us that we're not monitoring them. We do monitor, but as parents, we've seen plenty of children that aren't being monitored. Ultimately, my responsiblity to is to raise those children. Unfortunately, not all parents see it that way.

Re:Parental Rights

[SoulReaverDan]

So... your stepdaughter was badtalking you to her friends? Right, like you NEVER did that to your parents. I think that rather than slapping all the rights away, you should be addressing with your daughter what she felt upset about or why she was bad talking you, and a way you could improve your relationship. Taking away one privelage after another isn't gonna do a thing pal.

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[DanTheManMS]

New enemies of Georgia are people who teach the theory of evolution and create community web sites.

One county down here recently got blasted for putting a small sticker on science textbooks stating that evolution was a theory and not a fact. We may have low SAT scores, but we have progressed beyond the 1920s and the Scopes Trial you know. No need to generalize.

parents already have this authority

[adrianmonk]

Two things about this:

First of all, parents already have the authority to do this. Simply tell your child that they are forbidden from having a myspace account unless you also have access to it. If they refuse, ground them. If they still refuse, wipe their hard drive, take their computer, sell it on eBay, put the money in their college fund, and print them a little certificate congratulating them for having chosen to invest in their own future.

Second, you'll note that this is not exactly enforceable. They can always sneak around and create an account behind your back somehow. They might do it at a friend's house, or an internet cafe, or even at school if the school is really dumb enough to give them unsupervised Internet access (and they probably are). That leads to a big problem: you can't access what you don't know exists. And here's the key thing: that's going to be the case whether the state forbids it or the parents forbid it. The law doesn't solve this problem. Furthermore, for the law to even pretend to solve this problem, it would have to say, "children must inform their parents of all online accounts they create" rather than "parents must be able to get access to their children's accounts".

Furthermore, I think you can break parents down into two categories: those who will bother, and those who won't. The parents in the first category have probably already got the discipline thing down well enough that they can keep their kids from doing harmful things, like eating nothing but Fruit Loops for every meal, blowing off their homework, and talking to unknown persons on the Internet. The parents in the second category are not likely to check what's going on on their child's myspace account even if there were a law that granted them access.

This is a Good Thing

[timonbraun]

If the internets tubes people succeed in passing this law it will be a GOOD THING. It will be a huge spur to the move toward open networks with open standards and it will allow jurisdictional competition as well as design and usability competition. There is no reason why hundreds of sites couldn't offer people their own page- there will be anime sites, high-school sports sites, porn sites, French poetry sites, and the friends lists will be populated by people across all of them, using a unique ID that links back to their provider. Myspace has been oppressively lame for ages and if by some miracle their business is gutted they shouldn't be mourned. Given the hysteria over these sites and the deep ignorance of politicians they are more likely to give us a victory over Fox and friends than we could ever achieve on our own. Of course, minors may still have to click a box that says, "If I live in GA, TX, or NC I am over 18 and/or promise not to look at any of the naughty sites." Good luck with that, distinguished congresspeople.

Let's not blow this out of proportion

[dangermouse]

Cecil Staton, as another poster has pointed out, is kind of a known idiot. He's also all by himself on this. The response of the rest of the State Senate, and just about everyone else, has been: "What?"

It's not only a stupid idea, it's an unworkable stupid idea that's going nowhere. Yeah, it's been "proposed in Georgia", but it might as well have been proposed on the moon. It has no support in Georgia and shouldn't reflect on Georgia.

Re:Let's not blow this out of proportion

[tinkerghost]

Yeah, it's been "proposed in Georgia", but it might as well have been proposed on the moon. It has no support in Georgia and shouldn't reflect on Georgia.

Other than they elected the nutjob.
Of course here in MA we have our own nutjob who is proposing making spanking your child a felony.

Re:Let's not blow this out of proportion

[elrous0]

We used to have a similar nutcase here in South Carolina (okay, so this is South Carolina, where even moderates are a little nuts). His name was John Graham Altman. Periodically he'd put us back in the national news, introducing legislation to ban homosexuals from the state, or to fine Mexico $1 million for every illegal caught in the state, filibustering against state recognition of Martin Luther King Day, opposing domestic violence legislation for women stupid enough to go back to their abusive husbands (okay, maybe he had a bit of a point on that one). My personal favorite was his response to the ban on a "Choose Life" license plate. He introduced legislation for a "Choose Death" plate.

I actually kind of miss the mean-spirited, crazy old coot. You never knew what was coming next with that guy, but you knew it certainly wouldn't be boring.

-Eric

Re:Let's not blow this out of proportion

[dangermouse]

Other than they elected the nutjob.

Cecil Staton was elected with 38,000 votes in middle Georgia's 18th district. (His opponent got almost 24,000 votes.) There are something like 9 million people in the state. So again, yeah, some people in Georgia elected him, but those people can hardly be held as representative of Georgia as a whole. Otherwise, we wouldn't need a State Assembly, right?

This is a great idea!

[failedlogic]

Its about time they suggest this idea. However, I think there should be a bit more careful thought. We have to ask ourselves, not who are we trying to protect, but who would be breaking the law and how do we stop these people from breaking the law again?

This is why I propose, we do not threaten the content providers with breaking the law. Instead we should imprison the kids. Afterall, they're the ones sneaking behind their parent's, lawmakers and politician's backs! How dare they share photos of their friends' birthday parties!

Re:This is a great idea!

[failedlogic]

I didn't want to "ruin" my post with a note I was being sarcastic. In truth, I would think the actual solution would be to have locally run sites within neighborhoods, towns, e.g. smaller boundaries. There's no reason a kid should actually have to share all their info on Webspace for complete strangers (and potentially predators) from looking at it. Password protecting the sites and having a vouching system where someone vouches' the childs identity (again to prevent predators) would be a better idea. They can leave all personal info and school names out as well.

Just an idea. I think local businesses and ISPs to promote their names, might donate for free a site to the community. Would also be a lot easier to stop / contain harrassment from going on on much larger sites like Myspace since a local person would overlook the content. In case that would be a concern.

Heck, if the Senators are so concerned about it, why don't they just give the money from their own pockets to fund this? Why waste taxpayers' money on arguing in circles and getting Interest groups involved?

Re:Some Myspace age data

[arthurpaliden]

Finding kids to molest is much easier at the local mall where the odds of finding a 'child' are better.

MySpace Age Ranges By Gender
As Indicated By Users

Age Range % Male % Female % Total

12 to 15 0.0007 0.0012 0.0019
16 to 18 9.25 12.39 21.64
19 to 21 11.64 12.29 23.93
22 to 35 22.90 18.00 40.90
36 to 55 3.48 2.66 6.14
56 to 99 1.58* 1.53* 3.11

Totals 48.85 46.87 95.72

Based on sample size of about 40 million active users.
An active user visits their page at least once every 2 weeks.
Only about 1/3 of all MySpace users are active.

* Most likely users in the lower age groups lying.
A further analysis of their page data would determine
a truer age for each user.

I sent him an e-mail.

[JoshJ]

If you want to read it, I copied it here, it's 1100+ words, so I won't paste it into the forums.

Re:I sent him an e-mail.

[Doctor Faustus]

The Internet is also known as the "World Wide Web"
Not quite.

Re:I sent him an e-mail.

[JoshJ]

Technically inaccurate, yes (though only the hardcore techies distinguish between the "internet" and the "world wide web". To most-likely including this senator- it's all the same.) Metaphor useful for getting the point across? I think so.

Protect them from family

[nwogoldberg99]

If these [expletive deleted] in Georgia would actually look at the statistics, they would notice to between 80 and 90 percent (perhaps higher) of all child sexual abuse is committed by people who know the victims, and often times they are relatives (like an uncle or grandfather). Every kid I personally know of who was molested, had it done to them by an uncle or a boyfriend of their mother. Additionally only about 5% of all offenders abduct the child. If these lawmakers really want to protect the kids, they can't do it by controlling them. They need to search for another solution.

And what of the "kids"

[nightfire-unique]

.. who have idiot parents? I was lucky. Not everyone is.

The Internet is a tool of freedom for young people with stupid parents just as much as it is for adults with stupid governments.

Better Idea

[BostonVaulter]

How about a system where the parents can have an account that is tied to their child's. So they can be notified about everything the child does on the site.

Some important things to note are that this is opt-in, so the kids could always work around it. It would be the parents job to police they're kids. If the kids have rich social networks, it would be hard to hide from the parents if the parents know who their child is friends with.

This isn't an ideal situation, but it is a heck of a lot better than mandatory registration as kids.

The Senate Sucks

[Rukie]

As a teenager of 18, I've come to realize that the American Democracy truly sucks. I understand t hat there are currently problems with minors o nthe internet, but within 20-30 years all of these problems iwll be resolved with parents that are technologicaly sound. Currently, parents have no idea how to use parental controls or how to supervise their kids, and I know my parents can't figure out what I'm doing. I say leave the legal problems alone for now, and try to fix them later if problems still arise. For now, let the old farts leave us alone.

Re:The Senate Sucks

[drsmithy]

I understand t hat there are currently problems with minors o nthe internet, but within 20-30 years all of these problems iwll be resolved with parents that are technologicaly sound.

No, they won't. Firstly because those parents won't be "technologically sound" and secondly because they'll think they are and, thus, that they can ignore their parenting responsibilities by letting the machine do it for them.

Currently, parents have no idea how to use parental controls or how to supervise their kids, and I know my parents can't figure out what I'm doing.

Guess what ? If/when you have kids, the situation will be exactly the same.

Re:Unconstitutional?

[julesh]

"[T]he Constitution does not recognize a generalized right of "social association" that includes chance encounters in dance halls." DALLAS v. STANGLIN, 490 U.S. 19 (1989)

From the same decision:

Respondent's patrons, who may number as many as 1,000 per night, are not engaged in a form of "intimate association." Nor do the opportunities of adults and minors to dance with one another, which might be described as "associational" in common parlance, involve the
sort of "expressive association" that the First Amendment has been held to protect

These are the key bases upon which this decision was made. I don't believe either statement could reasonably be made about MySpace.

Re:QFT - idiot. HOw about this

[Anonymous Coward]

If a minor logs onto my website and creates an account, I get to bill his parents for $50,000 and his or her parents get 5 years in prison.

Or, how about everyone pass a drivers license test to access the web.
If you can't pass the test, you don't get access. If your so stupid you can't protect your family, or lock down your box, you don't belong on the web. Oh wait, that senator already flunked the test!

Re:Unconstitutional?

[smartr]

Perhaps the real problem is that phones don't have built in parental controls. Clearly, children must have parental permission to use any electronic device that lets them communicate with the outside world. Not just that, but the government should take the initiative by making punative laws, because parents can't be trusted to make intelligent decisions about electronic devices. It's only logical that some of today's children will become terrorists. We'd better keep them in the stone age so we can keep them under control.

What a fscking moron

[GuyverDH]

While I can sympathize with what they are trying to accomplish, I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why they think they can?

There's no way GA law can effect a site that's hosted in another state or country.

Don't they get it? No one government entity can hope to control the internet.

Not the US, not Korea, not China and sure as hell not Georgia.

I can hear it now. "But your honor, we passed dis here law thangy, and they went ahead and made it available to our childern." I do not suggest that this is how Georgians speak, but how the simpletons they must be would have little choice but to speak this way.

The children reached out to the service, pulled it into their homes. It's their PARENT'S responsibility to monitor their actions, not a company offering a service.

For God's sake ( I am a Christian, and will use my deity of choice, thank you), stop trying to legislate parental controls. It's up to the Parent to do this or not do this. period. BUTT OUT!

Do your damn job!

[bakana]

Every ISP that I know of supplies parental controls, I work for an ISP. The best parental control is ...The Parent. When my kids watch TV I watch it with them. When my kids use our computers, I'm with them. If they get to somehow see nudity I don't blame the broadcast station, it is my responsibility to change the channel. Then explain why I changed the channel to my children. I do not rely on the Internet, a location where information is free flowing, to restrict itself. The TV or computer are not babysitters, do your job as a parent and take the proper steps to take care of them. Do not rely on someone else to do that. Most parents do not want the government telling them how to parent yet they rely on the government to tell these companies how to interact with their children. Either you want government interference or you don't.

Re:Do your damn job!

[BalanceOfJudgement]

Dammit, thank you. Freakin' personal responsibility here, people..

Pedos of Georgia, rejoice

[Opportunist]

Instead of hacking your target's account, you now only have to claim you're their parent. You think myspace would go out of their way to find out if you really are if they're facing fines for not letting you in, while they don't for doing it?

people or property? Neither! - False dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

People or Property? Right. So do we treat minors as voting citizens, or livestock and eat them?

Neither obviously. You've made a false dilemma argument.

Most Children / Minors are not qualified to make important decisions about their life. The shitty part is that the choices young people make have such lasting affects and they make them when they have too little experience to make an informed choice.

It is hard being a parent. Your kids are just as likely to end up making exactly the opposite decision you want them to make. If you do everything you can to keep them from harm, then they won't know how to spot dangerous situations. And if you expose them to too much they will think the world is an evil place and lose hope, when it's really something in between and more or less what you make of it.

This law isn't saying parents have to approve every comment - only that minors need parental approval to open a myspace account. That's it. So parents have to be aware that an account was created. And for all the participation in their lives you may have there are plenty of hours in a day where someone could login and create an account undetected.

Without simple laws like this parents have to resort to logging everything their kids do. It is not a substitute for parenting. It's a simple way for parents to be aware of what they're kids are going without resorting to tracking everything they do.

Are you the same idiot....

[jotaeleemeese]

..... that sprouts this inane nonsense every time issues related to parenthood are discussed?

Paents do not own their children, their children have rights that their parents can't infringe.

To pretend that children should be subject to the same rights and obligations as fully grown adults is unrealistic, irresponsible and frankly fully idiotic.

I will not go to any more lengths to explain why this is so, but posts like this should not go unasnwered, specially when some derided moderators dish the insightful or interesting points so cheaply.

No, it isn't.

[jotaeleemeese]

Any responsible parent can't leave a child on his own and perfectly entitled to use as many tools as his disposal as possible in order to ensure the child does not get in harm's way.

Yeah sure.

[jotaeleemeese]

I will start my website here in the UK and I will request that information from US users.

Wake up people, those "legislators" are selling you snake oil.

Re:Some Myspace age data

[Dragonslicer]

Age Range % Male % Female % Total
Totals 48.85 46.87 95.72

So is that other 4.28% of users under 12 or over 99? I know statistics are rarely (never) completely accurate, but if you're giving numbers to two decimal places, I'd expect them to be accurate to at least the first decimal place.

Re:Enforcement?? (MOD PARENT UP)

[dave_h_in_philly]

Not only am I wondering about the enforcement of this law, but (and IANAL) wouldn't such a law constitute an unlawful restriction of interstate commerce, thus invalidating the law on Constitutional grounds?

Teenagers might not (and should not) have the same rights as bona fide adults, but this bill is poorly conceived and smacks of political pandering.

The slave-state has spoken!

[Heddahenrik]

"All men are created equal! "

"Women aren't men, of course! That goes without saying. And slaves with human right, how stupid is that?!? They belong to their owner. Don't tell me how to treat my slaves! If you would be a slave owner, then you would know that this is the only way!"

This is the same sick slave-owning mentality that lead to the American civil war and generally turned slaves and slave-owners into beasts.

If you can't treat your kids as equals with lesser experience, I hope that they soon will grow stronger than you and lock you up in a room where do don't bother anyone. And you have trained to treat weaker people like that, so it's likely they do as soon as they get the chance.

BTW: I'm quite happy to commit felony to protect my costumers from their parents. Bring it on, you pathetic slave-owners. See if your arm can cross the Atlantic!

Re:The slave-state has spoken!

[neminem]

What kind of sick shows do you run, that your costumers need to be protected from their parents? Can anyone say child labor laws?

No, but seriously, jokes about the awful typos in your post aside, you're kind of right.

Re:The slave-state has spoken!

[Heddahenrik]

I blame it all on the spell-checker that has made me way too lazy to check my spelling. It was correctly spelled anyway, just wrong word ;)

We're the site owners, duh? And how...

[Mirar]

Even if it wasn't a joke, I think the majority of the slashdotters that are affected are the site owners, not the kids or the parents.

I know I get a little worried, how the ... will I be able to know if it's a kid signing up?

Re:We're the site owners, duh? And how...

[nospam007]

Hereby I allow my son Billyboy to join Myspace.
My father

Yes,how to do it?

[Mirar]

Yes, as a site owner, how would you make sure?

One way to make sure would be to block all US IP# from registering, but that doesn't seem practical (and it's not 100%).

That it's not possible to realize never stopped laws before.

Well duh

[fastcoke11]

Why would we possibly put the onus on parents to take care of their own children? We can just have the government do it! Next up, the bill to transform all school systems into federal boarding schools.

"This isn't Russia. Is this Russia? This isn't Russia."

Re: Absolutely has a place on Slashdot!

[TaoPhoenix]

We don't HAVE kids... some of us ARE kids...

Paraphrased from the article:

"A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as **SlashDot**, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting:
"[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of **Slashdot** failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both.""

Since we know that the intelligent youth are an important aspect of SlashDot's contributing membership, this hits closer to home than you might think. "No, Timmy, you can't post a driver technical spec on Slashdot. It's past your bedtime."

Think of the Children!!

the captcha word for this post is Subverts.

its the parents fault

[Dan541]

Its time parents start taking resposibility.

How about a bill that punishes the parents?

IT was suggested here in Australia that parents should be fined evertime their kids got busted by the cops but people said it was unfair to punish the parents.

Someone explain to me how it is not fair to punish the parents but is ok to punish a third party?

Re:Some Myspace age data

[arthurpaliden]

Myspace pages owned by bands are aged 100 years, they make up the last 4.28 %.

It makes sense

[Hoi Polloi]

If I was a parent in Georgia I'd be worried too because we all know that The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Gullible fools become terrorists.

[FatSean]

Fools who truely believe they will live forever after death are much more likely to blow themselves up for their imagined reward in 'heaven'.

You don't want our children to grow up to be terrorists, do you?

299

[Anonymous Coward]

299th post

-1 Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

I was tempted to debate the matter after your first line, but it quickly became clear that you're incapable of rational thought.

Blackout

[Ann Coulter]

What if all sites that are potentially liable simply delist all Georgia based ISP originating IPs from logging in? This would be technically feasible and eliminate any legal liability they have. Such potentially liable sites include Google (for their Groups), MSN (for their Groups), and Yahoo (for their, uh, Groups). This would probably be detrimental to the Georgia economy and the ad revenues of Google, MSN, and Yahoo. However, the potential liability might outweight it for the liable sites and therefore, the may give the burden of this law to the Georgia state residents.

--

By the way, I'm a Georgia state resident.

Children (Re:people or property)

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

We won't let them drink or gamble until 21, vote, smoke or sign contracts until 18, but we used to allow execution of 16 year old kids (Nevada actually killed someone who was a 16 year old at the time of their offense) and we still have CHILDREN SENTENCED TO LIFE WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE, juvie lifers, children who it is illegal to parole forever, thus thrown away.

Even for fairly minor offenses, we have kids in Florida who are banned for life from voting for a juvie felony even though they aren't old enough to vote yet. How can a right not yet granted be revoked? And they do enforce felon non-voting with active checks and purges from the rolls of felons; heck they removed tons of people before the 2004 election, including non-felons and people supposedly convicted in 2007 even though that year hadn't come yet. But I digress.

Lower the voting age to 13 and treat children fully as adults, or bring back the juvenile justice system.

Pick an age:

For voting
Drinking
Smoking
Gambling
Signing contracts
Being drafted
Being executed (abolish the death penalty instead, but if not...)
Being sentenced to life without parole (or even with, or for any minimum sentence or any maximum over 5 years - so all sentenced must be from 0 to x months/years, max 5, mandatory parole reviews, must grant parole unless a clear and present danger).
Able to do adult things

Pick a number from 13 to 21 and stick with it. Either they are responsible (trusted, but also held accountable) or not. Don't try to give them responsibilities and not rights.

{see beginning of page}

[Anonymous Coward]

its called "show me your webpage or im taking the computer"

How do they expect to enforce it?

[Pyrex5000]

Myspace should take pre-emptive action on this. Using IP geolocation, they should present a page to anyone connecting from Georgia informing them that, due to pending legislation that they cannot conceivably comply with, Myspace will no longer be providing service to anyone in the state. Followed by the phone number for the asshat politician that thought this was a good idea.

The more your tighten your grip...

[jvkjvk]

It's nice that you are conditioning your child to grow up in the society he'll be living in: Ubiquitous monitoring, trust through surveillance (you have "two-way trust" - that's a good one), blind obedience to Authority.

In doing what you are doing, you are not only teaching him your beliefs and values but instilling a distrust in you, his parents, that runs much deeper that you think. You do not trust your son. Get over it. Saying you trust him is not the same as actually doing so. You do not trust him at all, in the slightest. Not one bit. No matter what you say your actions belie your words. In fact, the contradictions created in your own mind by this dichotomy are in themselves damaging to your children as well as yourself.

You say your son trusts you. I can go along with that, considering he's 9. It's much easier to bend your mind to such contradictions when you're young. However, I don't expect that this will last until he's 18. Unless you are able to stunt his growth, he should consciously see the glaring obviousness of your lies in a few years, 5 max i would say.

If he does, you will have created someone who is able to succeed in the modern world of Catch-22's. If he suppresses this knowledge, you will have created a damaged and defective human being (quite possibly schizophrenic). Either way it seems like they will be appropriately paranoid.

Hmm, I guess I take that back. I figure you have probably a good chance of producing someone who is able to cover their tracks pretty well therefore has the skillz to avoid the much more lax authoritarian regimes currently called governments (after all the big G can't afford the extensive monitoring you engage in).

So, how do you expect God to change your belief structures if you won't listen to his representatives on Earth? Do you expect some miraculous experience like Paul (nee Saul) had? I find the best way is to open myself to the possibility that I might be wrong. It's called faith, you know, the actual bleeding edge of it. Faith that your core belief structures will still be there as you question the axioms, roots and branches of it and discard or modify your beliefs. Faith that even if you determine that one or a cluster of beliefs are incorrect (i.e. you change your mind), you will still be in God's loving eyes and are still able to continue the Great Work here on earth.

It doesn't even have to be an active thing; just the sensitivity to know that real world experiences can, and should, send ripples through your belief structures, shaking out the bugs. I guess this, then, depends on the ability to see your beliefs as a gestalt of multiple different ideas.

I am wondering where this Paranoid Surveillance trip comes out of your Faith. You need to find that ideological plank of your belief structures and examine what's wrong with it, because something sure is. While I agree that one's actions should stem from one's beliefs (which is why I am bothering writing this), I think your path to right action has been diverted by extraneous belief structures.

That is, you have some irrational Fear that is haunting you. This, in turn, enables an environment where the seeds of paranoia have grown to blossom, since you have not rooted out this fear. A subset of your belief structures is actively engaged in finding a set of patterns in real world examples to assure your self that you are on the correct path. Judging by your actions, these structures are under control of your paranoid tendencies. They have hooked into your Religious structures at some level such that you believe your behaviour towards your son is both necessary and in his best interest at a fundamental level when in really it's mostly just Paranoia having it's way with you.

Re:The more your tighten your grip...

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

I wonder if they still wipe the poor kids ass....
by the time i was in my early teens I was taking the train into NYC by myself.

... and turn off that damned music, too.

[tggreen]

I have heard that Georgia is also trying to ban Rock and Roll. :-)

Re:If we accept restrictions on children in genera

[mi]

[...] no one seems to be proposing that all minors have permission to visit the park. [...] Why even push this legislation if there is no practical way to implement it?

At least one aspect of the law makes sense. Currently, a mother contacting MySpace/Yahoo/whatever to know, who her child associating with, can not be given an answer — because of the existing federal law, which prohibits divulging such information to anyone (BTW, remember the story about a dead soldier's family trying to access his Yahoo! mailbox — they ran into the same law, AFAIR).

Allowing legal guardians to access all such information is not an equivalent to demanding a written permission to access park, it is more like an equivalent to allowing them access to their locker... And it makes sense...