Slashdot Mirror
Parents To Block Kids From Joining MySpace
Reservoir Hill writes "A New York Times blog notes that attorneys general of 49 states are announcing a partnership with MySpace to fight sexual predators on social networks by letting parents submit the e-mail addresses of their children, so the company can prevent anyone from using that address to set up a profile. MySpace will also set up a 'closed' section for users under age 18 so only their established online friends can visit their pages. MySpace also promises to hire a contractor to identify and delete pornographic images on the site. 'This set of principles is a landmark and milestone because it involves an acknowledgment of the importance of age and identity authentication,' said Connecticut attorney General Richard Blumenthal." Blumenthal also actually said "If we can put a man on the moon..."
With a half-zillion free email providers out there, blocking a kid's email address will last all of two minutes. All they have to do is create an alias at Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
It reminds me of the early days of Hotmail, when they "verified" that you were a US resident by having you enter a matching city and ZIP code. Which just meant that all their overseas users lived in Beverly Hills, 90210.
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......
Someone needs a dose of reality.
I've seen on Slashdot all month. Parents can submit email addresses all day long, and their kids will create disposable addresses all day long.
Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'll start by submitting the e-mail addresses of everyone I dislike and claim to be their parents and say that they are lieing about their age. Another well thought out government idea.
What's to stop the kid from creating a secondary address via Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, or any one of the millions of other free email services available on the internet?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And exactly how many rapes and molestations occur because of MySpace? How about we place the same restrictions on schools and churches, where you are certainly more likely to end up being molested.
Also, since when did we place the responsibility on the WEBSITE to prevent an IP address from reaching it? And what about DHCP? What about the next person that gets your IP in a few months? Why can't you filter out access on your own rather than placing the burden of your absurd paranoia on websites that have nothing to do with your ridiculous "my baby gonna get raped" fantasies?
And no, I didn't RTFA. Look at my UID. I'm old school and that's how I roll.
What do you bet there may be a long list of people wanting that job?
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
that there's no way for kids to sign up for a hotmail, or gmail, or any of the thousands of other of disposable email accounts out there. Finally government action that isn't easily subverted by clever children. Now we can all sleep at night while machines and other people of unknown character raise our kids.
I'm wondering just which state is not taking part in this scheme? And could kids just claim to be from there to avoid the list.
Considering Phlebas, whoever the hell he is.
To quote Dilbert: Your flawed analogy only shows that other people can do other things.
Not especially awesome dude. sorry
Soooo, what's a guy gotta do to score that job?
The answer is none!
No one is raped because of any factor OTHER than the intent of the rapist. If we start down the road of blaming other things, offenders get an easy second party to transfer some of the responsibility.
You see people try to pass blame on everything. What she/he was wearing. How he/she was raised. What the school didn't do. What the website did. Is it a post-modern thing where we don't want to just say that the offender did it, the offender is responsible?
MySpace can be blamed for a lot of things (like promoting 1990's style web layout), but offender blame is 100% owned by the offender. This is another case of nanystate think-of-the-children bullcrap.
THL phish sticks
to give this a second thought should be put out to pasture. There is nothing more they can do for society.
Whats the 1 state that hasn't jumped in on this?
This list sounds like a perfect high-value target for every malware distributor and sicko in the net. I'd bet that most kids are worse than their parents at opening emails and clicking yes to "interesting" installs. "OOOHH! A free Pony Screen Saver!" Pwned by ponies....
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"...a 'closed' section for users under age 18 so only their established online friends can visit their pages." The difference between 'closed' and the already-existing 'private' function is...?
I'll just have to create a profile that's under 18 to get to the lolis.
Oh, wait, there's only sluts on MySpace. Nevermind. Get them off the Internet, either by parental intervention or raep - doesn't bother me so long as they're gone.
I am continually ashamed that he represents my state.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
"Your honor, I trusted myspace to verify the age of the people I met online. I know she only looks 13 your honor, but her profile said she was 19!"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
They also intend to default 16-17 year olds profiles to "private". Not a bad idea, but how do they plan on verifying age?
expandfairuse.org
Most of the people that I know who are old enough to have kids on MySpace know a LOT less about using the Internet than their kids do. (Yeah, I know; there will be a few
Any "security" measures designed to "protect" kids don't have a chance of working unless either:
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Don't you think that is a little strong to be calling a parent's actions to provide a good environment censorship?
P.S. Don't ask what I think a good environment is. I haven't had kids but I believe it resembles the one I grew up in.
Parents have choice over the content their children view; children do not. It is part of the parenting process; this is just a tool for such, like the V-chip. Different parents hold different values, and children mature at different rates, so such tools are not really that bad, given that once somebody becomes of legal age, such restrictions are gone. For example: I've been able to watch R rated movies since the age of 5, yet in the early 90's when we first got a computer and the internet, my old man kept draconian enforcement over it; it really wasn't a big deal in the long run and I never grew up deprived as a result.
Much better idea is to include info about internet predators, etc. in sex ed class. If done right would do much more to prevent problems than trying to tie My Space to email accounts which many respondents have pointed out is so easy to bypass. Forbiding kids from doing something just makes it more enticing. Realistically explaining the dangers of things is more effective than prohibition.
...would be to just shut down MySpace altogether. That'll accomplish essentially the same thing, won't it? Unless anyone over the age of 18 actively uses MySpace (except for self-promoting politicians and pop-stars)...
So, in security, we have this notion called an "attack tree". Let's suppose you want to stop someone from stealing your family jewels. You put the in a safe, and all is well, right? Well... maybe not. We create this tree, where the root is "steal the jewels", and the children under the root are various ways you might accomplish this ("Use a key to open the safe", "Drill out the hinges on the safe", "Create hole in safe"). And each of these nodes can be divided out further into more children, so to use a key for example, you either need to steal a key, or be one of the people who has a legitimate use for the key, or be the locksmith who installed the lock.
Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.
For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.
Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".
Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.
This won't work for all of the above reasons. I think parents are going to have to learn that if they want their children to not do bad things on the computer that they are going to have to monitor their children themselves. There simply isn't anyway to pull anything like this off without some major governmental privacy violations. So I think we should stop wasting millions and let parents raise their children. I'm sure parenting children is a tough job, but I think it's one best left to those that made them.
yes, looks like it's that time again.. time for taco & crew to block tinyurl.
Is this how we treat our society's ugliest children? By protecting them from boys? And older creepy men? Maybe one of those men has a diamond ring in his pocket...
I suspect many people know that this is bogus. It's just something that's easy to do politically and legally and gives the appearance as if MySpace and politicians are "doing something".
I wouldn't complain to loudly about it; it's far better than if they actually came up with something effective instead.
Not really. Part of the job of a parent is to decide what their kid is ready for. Good or bad, it's still censorship.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This is just another attempt by some politicians to claim that they are fighting to protect our children. Later on, when nobody actually remembers any of this, these politicians can tell a cheering crowd, "I worked hard to give parents the ability to limit their child's MySpace access, and help shield their children from sexual predators online." Of course it is idiotic, and children will find a way around it in less than a minute, but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program, not another pathetic attempt at technical measures to block their access.
Palm trees and 8
For what you say in the first sentence to be true, the rapist's target has to be chosen randomly, and it most certainly is not. Therefore behaviour by the victim modifies their chance of becoming a victim, and hence they play a part in becoming a victim.
Naturally this of course has nothing to do with the sentencing of rapists, but is just common sense. Denying it in the name of PC will not help the situation.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
You must EDUCATE kids. Hiding them in a bubble solves nothing. It is an insult to their intelligence, and it teaches them falsities about the world. Ratings on media can be a beautiful thing as it can act as a warning sign for parents who may need to sit down and have a talk with their child before injecting them with the media. On the other hand, systems like the V-Chip, or in this case, "banning" children from "myspace", end up with children missing something without the understanding as to why. The perfect way to brew defiant kids who lie is to start by lying to them first. These defiant kids will end up seeking that missing bit, no matter what stops them, completely rejecting important advice at the moment where it is most important.
I'll be the first to admit I have no experience here (neither a parent or a psychologist) but this seems like common sense to me.
but instead it took fags screwing their little kids in the butt to get parents to be active in their kids lives. not that fags shouldn't be blamed but let's turn our attention to the real slackers, the parents.
Oh well, we haven't encouraged parents to actually speak to their kids about this stuff for a long time, opting to shield children from anything deemed harmful by anyone.
Palm trees and 8
In other news, Yahoo.com announces 3 million new email users.
Today, the Attorneys General of 49 states took another step towards running for governor by knocking down yet another straw-man.
There, fixed that story for you. No need to thank me.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Kids who aren't smart enough to come up with an email address that their parents don't know genuinely do need to be protected from online predators, who will abuse their ignorance.
Also this way, rather then imposing arbitrary restriction based on age, their is a built in opt out based on a child's actual readiness to dis-regard their parents tech ignorance.
The Attorney General should be going after parents who don't parent their children. But no politician has the balls to go after his own irresponsible constituents.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
All someone has to do is write a script that systematically generates and submits email addresses, and no one would ever be able to create a new Myspace account ever again!
(Yes, I know, you'd probably need to make a full-scale DDOS out of it so that MySpace can't tell that all the submissions are coming from the same IP address, and it's entirely possible that you'd crash Myspace's servers before successfully submitting all of the possible email addresses at pingable domains. Perhaps a more attainable goal would be to wipe out all of the possible Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail addresses fewer than 10 characters long?)
children everywhere are being hospitalized due to uncontrolled fits of laughter.
And later, nerds who read news want to create a blacklist to block stupid politicians and law makers from being able to make new laws.
Infact I could see why not?
... oh wait proxies. Nevermind unless there is a way to block them too.
/system32/etc/host file by adding the I.P. for www.barneythedinosaur.com for www.myspace.com scares my kids quite well and blocks myspace. Good thing they haven't figured out that one yet.
Maybe as a CEO of a major telecom I could charge an extra $5 a month to firewall sites.
Or I could just charge $5 a month more and have the kids still find free proxies to go around it.
In the meantime a simple fix in the
http://saveie6.com/
This problem is so blown out of proportion that it's ridiculous.
I had the home network running through a transparent proxy which blocked certain websites. MySpace was on the block list (because the kid broke the rules about posting personal information, such as phone numbers).
She could still get to MySpace if she went to a friend's house, but the inconvenience of doing that made it "not a fun thing."
The blocking by email system is nothing but a feel-good bandaid that does nothing.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Botnet.
If it wasn't so sad. There are a ton of places online where anyone can get email addresses for free. This initiative is useless since their kids can just get an email address their without their parents ever knowing about it. The lawmakers are even more clueless than the parents. It goes to show that they can't get it right even when they have the best intentions. Mix in some not-so-good intentions, and I'm not talking about the "predators" in this case, and you've got yourself one huge clusterfuck.
Yeah, seriously.
By their logic, we should also ban kids from being outside ever without an adult. After all, some stranger could pull up, offer them candy, and drive off with them in the car.
Oh wait, my parents dealt with that by just encouraging me not to be fucking idiot. Just like how these parents should handle their kids.
When I was younger, I told my mother I was "chatting" with someone in Germany with a Shell account and she had no idea what I was talking about. When I'd tell people about the Internet, people would look at me cross-eyed.
Most of my e-mail was done with TeleMate over FidoNet. I could plagiarize CD Based encyclopedias and nobody knew the wiser.
It must suck to grow up in the Internet Age.
On a related note, I think sending in your kids' e-mail addresses isn't the worst idea. It would at least keep very young kids from creating accounts on there.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
So Myspace built itself up to be a massive site for people looking at pictures of young and/or underage girls. It started with the 20-something crowd, but the teenagers made it explode. Now Myspace is a huge site, and cuts a deal with the AG to stop things. Now, if an upstart site starts bringing in Myspace's target customers, who wants to bet that Myspace can sic those same AG's on the upstart competition.
The teenage market is REALLY important to getting a new social technology adopted, and Myspace basically agreed to reduce their service a bit, in return for defacto preventing any competition from targeting them at all.
These are interesting times. I'm a relatively new father (the elder of the two will turn 3 in a few weeks.) When I lived with my parents, I was the only one in my house with an e-mail account. My parents only had the vaguest idea what one was. It makes things complicated when making rules for young-uns. My eldest plays computer games, but only during approved times. He's (obviously) not myspacing yet, but I'm sure he will. And parents like me are in new territory. Fortunately, many of us are tech-savvy, but still in an awkward situation.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
kids will bypass this. when they do, they're stuck with privacy settings that fit in a single checkbox. parents should be telling their kids to get on facebook instead, which has default privacy settings and high granularity for privacy than any other social network on the planet.
I think the larger issue that American society is presented with is not the ways parents must adapt to new technologies to keep up with their kids and teens, but rather, all the ways in which despite the promise of "convenience" of these technologies, middle-class American families have less time to foster the kind of physically present, interpersonal relationships with their children that are necessary for proper social development. We are inundated by the tidal wave of information and content, overstimulated by the omnipresent reach of media--whether it is in the form of television, print, internet, wireless, radio, or film, there can be no doubt that these technologies have enriched our lives in profound ways. However, parents across the country are conducting on a heretofore unprecedented and massive scale a social experiment with their children, raising them from the cradle to adulthood amidst this sea of instant communication, because they are either unwilling or unable to actually spend the time to be, well, parents. To be fair, the kids don't make it any easier--they see what their friends are doing, and for them, hanging out online is the equivalent (or better) to hanging out in person. They will naturally gravitate to those methods that are least understood by their parents.
In short, over the last 20 years, the interaction between parent and child has significantly degraded in both the quality of communication as well as its duration. As technologies to facilitate virtual socialization advance, their effect on the nuclear family structure will have long-lasting social and cultural effects.
Again, this is not to say that technology is bad, or that the only "true" way to raise a family is to completely sever one's connection to the wired (and wireless) world. It is, however, a wake up call. Is it really necessary to put television screens and DVD players in those minivans and SUVs? Do children really need to be babysat like this in a car? What ever happened to learning how to sit patiently? What ever happened to learning to develop one's imagination? I grew up without these toys; my parents drove me around all the time and I didn't need to be entertained. When it comes to MySpace or the internet in general, the genie's already out of the bottle. These measures are laughable, because it's not merely too little too late--talking about how easily circumvented such measures are is actually irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is, we wouldn't be in this mess if parents actually parented, and kids weren't so addicted to media. Playing email games and spying on one's children is not parenting. Taking the time to learn and understand them is far more effective. But that's easier said than done--corporate America has had us passive consumers in the palm of their hands for quite some time now. They are the ones bringing up today's children, grooming them to be the indentured servants of tomorrow's economy. And to prove my point, I think it's particularly telling that when the "threat level" is raised to "orange" or some other stupid color of the week, signifying that we should all be scared into signing our rights away, the government has the gall to tell us in the very same breath to "continue shopping and act like everything is normal."
This MySpace situation is not about trust or technology. It's really only one small facet of the greater reality that we are living in a society so fueled by rampant consumerism and debt that parents have lost the ability to raise well-adjusted children.
>parents submit the e-mail addresses of their children, so the company can prevent anyone from using that address to set up a profile.
-hehe
> I'll start by submitting the e-mail addresses of everyone I dislike and claim to be their parents and say that they are lieing about their age.
You must be really nice to your enemies if you're trying to save them from the horrors of joining MySpace.
In an unrelated note, I have to wonder, if 49 attorney generals pushed for this thing, which one didn't?
This is just another attempt by some politicians to claim ...
True, but that doesn't answer the underlying question to this effort, or efforts like this in the future, and that is "How can a parent parent in the internet age?"
Today, both parents work (often by necessity) and have little available time and energy, while kids generally have less supervision, more privacy, mobility, and loads of discretionary income. And that's in a Best Of scenario where single-parent households and troubled kids aren't the norm. If the internet is the equivalent of "everything in the street outside", then you're faced with a situation where that "outside" is now inside the kid's bedroom or in a similar private sphere.
Small wonder the focus is on external entities to fix the situation. Granted, there's an alarming if not misplaced trend to rely on schools, websites, or mall security guards to address the problems, but until all this gets more manageable for a parent, I'd suggest withholding the "It won't work" or "A really stupid idea" comments until one considers the lack of alternatives.
Sure, it's the responsibility of the parents. Sure, there's no substitute for good parenting. And yes, there's probably lots of good parents and thoughtful and educated children out there. But I'd wager there's a shitload of parents who don't know what to do, have failed in countless ways, and have nowhere to turn. That won't change any time soon, so society is left to deal with the problem collectively. And if voting issues are any indication, the welfare of kids (whether in the guise of education funding or nutty protection schemes), ranks up at the top with money and property issues. All have emotional content so simple cost vs. benefit analyses won't win the day for the folks at Myspace, or any politican proposing something similar.
Personally, I think all these Think of the Children efforts are going to fuck things up for the rest of us. Then again, I think similarly emotional efforts in the area of gun control, taxes and drug enforcement are going to fuck things up for the rest of us, to the extent they haven't already.
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist. It gets old extremely quickly. And I suspect these people would be looking for things on the same level of seaminess as that.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
we can keep one off uranus?!
FEAR FEAR! Hide your precious Children away! Terrorists, SEX, HACKERS!
They might learn something about the Internet! They might be exposed to the outside world! They might learn something from their experiences! They might compete with the rest of us in the global economy!
FEAR FEAR! Hide your Children away!
If I had mod points today...
We were doing so well at the end of the 90s getting everyone to acknowledge the need for sex education. Then the 'Abstinence Only Education' people started showing up, making a worse mockery out of 'education' than the 'Intelligent Design' people ever dreamed of.
Parents: TALK TO YOUR DAMNED KIDS ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO FUCK THEM! It'll do a whole hell of a lot more to keep them safe than any kind of monitoring software or any absurd volume of legislation.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
So rather then deal with many times a day actual sexual abuse of young people AGAINST THEIR WILL by adults, they're choosing to put all attention, and diverting everyone else's attention, to a problem that is at least 50% the fault of the young person and happens maybe twice a month at the most.
Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.
Despite shows like "Catch a Predator", 13-15 year old girls who have casual sex with 40 year olds they've talked to for a few hours online don't show up in news articles or in victimization reports-I'm betting they're rare to the point of extinction. More importantly, I SERIOUSLY doubt that 13-15 year olds are inviting strangers they've never talked to over the phone or seen via web cam to their homes for sex. Even the dumbest teen girls seem to have some ability to read body language and facial expressions via video and/or hear tone, inflection over audio. I don't think they're inviting total strangers to their house.
BUT, this is what we've been led to believe. We've been told there's a problem based solely on the existence of demand. We know there's no shortage of adult men willing to engage in casual sex with 13 year old girls, but we haven't been shown that there's even 1 girl willing to reciprocate for every 1000 guys.
Everybody goes nuts over this manufactured problem and take attention away from real victimization-that is young people being sexually abused against their will and without their consent. Real abuse is ignored in favor of virtually non-existent abuse.
Even worse is the fact that any teen girls meeting men online for sex is going of her own free will, whether her consent is informed or not is another issue. It seem that she would bear at least 40% of the blame for anything that happens.
The persons most likely to sexually abuse young people are the same people being constantly implored to monitor their teens every move-parents, step parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, teachers, priests, coaches, neighbors. Strange guy on the internet is somewhere above that guy that works the 7-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 5pm.
Blumenthal has been leading this fight for a year, but got beat down by the legislature and a bunch of bloggers. This vastly scaled-back, opt-in approach is a very positive sign. However, if you live in North Carolina, your legislature actually did rush through the more punitive bill (making any site with user-generated content practically impossible to operate under the law) without bothering to read the thing first. You can see the bill -- S.132 -- here.
A recent story in a dutch free newspaper touched on a related subject, mobile phones. Aparently some boys had used one to film a girl in the shower, and when caught seemed unaware that this was illegal.
Not that spying on girls in the showers is anything new, but the tools for doing so have become a LOT easier and kids seem to not have gotten any brighter.
If my sister had wanted to photograph herself she would have had to borrow our parents camera, a rather large thing, got some film, have the film developed (at a place where any of the workers could see the pictures) and then do whatever she intended to do with them.
IF she gave them to her boyfriend he would then either have had to had copies made with it at a photolab (with the person working there offcourse seeing the pictures) or havbe found a considerable amountof private time with the photostat machine (or whatever those early printing machines were called the older slashdot member might have used for the school newspaper).
A considerable amount of effort and a lot of hassle for the image to get all over the place.
Now check a porn site like cheggit and search for homemade porn and you will find countless examples of girls that photographed/filmed themselves for a limitted audience and now find themselves all over the web.
If I had brought a camera to school with the intent for filming the girls shower room, I am pretty sure people would have noticed the rather bulky gear. A mobile phone? Well, everyone got one of those.
If you watch a program like To catch a predator one thing you might notice is from how far away they come. My sister only had to worry about the local pervs, not ones across the whole of the netherlands.
Our world has changed, we have gotten ourselves a set of tools and put them into the hands of kids who aren't any brighter then we were and lets be honest, we were DUMB! As a male I had different kinds of dumbness (driving a bike down a steep incline with building rubble on either side, diving in shallow water, etc etc) but most kids have the common sense of ... well of kids, I can't really think of anything that has less common sense, even kittens learn faster.
The problem is that the measures proposed will do absolutly nothing to stop kids from making the wrong choices. Part of growing up is making the wrong choices but I am saying this as a kid who didn't impale himself on a piece of iron sticking out of concrete, broke his neck diving in 1 meter deep water or got raped, darwin awards not for nothing exclude people below 16(or 18)
Saying we should educate kids instead to deal with the realities of the internet and related modern technologie is a tired old cliche but sadly it is the only thing that stands a chance. Not that it will work, kids don't want to be educated, and you can tell people a thousand times that every photograph you take is forever and can be seen by the entire world and you will still get kids exposing themselves online because kids ain't smart and there ain't nothing you are going to do about, same as kids still get killed because they dive in shallow water as they have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. Posting yourselve nude on the net is just the latest way of being stupid.
Not that it anything new, ages ago during a holiday camp I was charged with doing the photographing, this includes some pics of the girls in our class daring each other on to show more and more. No I am not bragging, they were flirting with the camera not me, but that was decades ago and really was no different then what you see on myspace, but I did not have the means to distribute it worldwide at a whim. I thought aout making copies and in the time it took me to start doing it I realized it would cause far to much trouble and didn't and kept them private.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'd buy a domain and sell all my friends email addresses their parents would never know about so they could keep signing up on Myspace.
Politicians get everything backwards. We have education programs for real dangers like roads near schools to teach kids to stay out of the road, when we should be building bridges and tunnels to physically separate kids from traffic. (Of course they also create "school zones" to annoy millions of drivers everyday around the country, too.) Then they try to build physical barriers for rare problems of pedophiles violating children over the internet, which, to the best of my knowledge, is physically impossible already. (You need to actually meet in the real world to be violated.)
The real question is how can we get the politicians, and the public at large, to assess risks and apply solutions appropriate to their likelihood?
Aren't both generally the religious nutters?
I am one of the co-founders of NutshellMail.com and we offer a free, non-technical service for monitoring your children's messages on MySpace, Facebook and all email accounts through any inbox you already use. It works by sending a snapshot of all messages that have been sent to your children's various messaging accounts. NutshellMail allows you to determine when and how often the email updates are sent. Through the emailed update, you can view messages and even delete them. You can also use NutshellMail to consolidate all of your own messaging accounts; and it is compliant with most corporate email policies. The site is still underdevelopment, but you can submit your email address to be one of the first users. www.NutshellMail.com
Reduce, reuse, cycle
No kids will thing it is cool or worth their time except maybe to hack the hell out of it. For a very minor problem MySpace and attorneys and parents overreact as usual. Nobody bothers with real statistics or real danger assessment. Just lock it up and lock kids out in the name of "safety". Pathetic.
In other news kids block parents' access to the internet.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Wouldn't it be both easier and cheaper if parents actually took an interest in their children's activities online, instead of trying to outsource the cost and bother of raising their children to everyone else.
So I suppose that it was partially because I was dumb enough to be born a girl that my father put his hands on my neck and threatened to break it if I didn't let him do what he wanted to do to me? I totally reject your placing any blame on me for being a victim of rape.
At the current level of freedom on the net is there anything that can really be done? sure you can put net "nanny" program on your net work at home, but kids have still got cellphones, school access and all sorts of other ways onto the net.
What we need is registered emails for minors with schools and a social net work that protects the kids from adults...cause lets get real blocking emails would never have kept me off facebook, you would have least have to have tryed to distract the kids.
"You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people." by notnAP (846325)
But then these parents would also have to explain what sex is.
Worse still; they'd have to explain what sexual behaviour isn't good.
And ever worse; they'd have to admit that some sexual behavious IS good.
God forbid parents would have to be honest about sex to their children! Better to just leave them uneducated and try and ban everything.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
However, in my house we practice this apparently rare thing called, 'mutual respect' whereby he doesn't do such things, and I don't invade his privacy.
Actually, in your house, you practice this thing called willful ignorance, where by not checking you let yourself believe he's not doing anything.
I used to be a kid, so I know the only way you can know what your kid is up to is to trust, but validate.
paintball
Why do kids not have a right to privacy?
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
Tell you what -- before I had a computer entirely my own, I was certainly allowed to have a pencil and paper. And I was allowed to keep it in a secret place, if I wanted to. And my parents did not read my various diaries (though there weren't many attempts).
When I went out, I could go pretty much anywhere, I just had to tell them where I was going, and not stay out too late (most of the time). When I got a cell phone, they didn't screen my calls, they didn't have access to my call logs.
My parents apparently did a good job teaching me mutual respect. And the process has nothing to do with the Internet. I suspect this sudden Puritanical paranoia has much more to do with the tendency of people to suspend all reason when it comes to computers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Strange guy on the internet is somewhere above that guy that works the 7-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 5pm.
That guy definitely needs to be fired then - showing up 3 hours late and leaving 6 hours early.
paintball
different situation. If you agreed to meet your dad online and then that happened, it would make sense.
What/who are these "online sexual predators" anyway? What is this thing that we should protect the children from? Has there ever been some serious research into this, which would confirm that it is a problem.
In a few years, I may be afraid that my daughter, when going out, may get into trouble and at worst even be raped if she happens to cross the path of some drunken assholes. Unfortunately, rapes do happen. Whether in big cities or in small towns.
But even that may be (statistically) less of a danger than a car accident.
But this "online sexual predators" hysteria seems to me to be just that. Some completely hysterical fantasy. Of course, there are a few weird people among us. Some (very few) of them even dangerous. But these are dangerous in real life. If children are educated to deal with possible real life problems (which they hopefully are), and understand not to trust strangers and take some elementary precaution in dealing with unknown people, then there is nothing special about online communities.
Aren't there any journalists who report these initiatives as the idiocy they seem to be?
Aren't both generally the religious nutters?
Yes.
And you could argue that the church has a vested interest in making sure very few people ever get a halfway decent education - that way, their senior members remain the one-eyed man in the proverbial kingdom of the blind.
AFAIK, in a few US states you'd go to jail even if she showed you a faked driver's license and a birth certificate that said she's 19.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Very good point. In the UK we are 30 miles from France, but I know nothing about their departments, post codes, etc. And I know one US ZIP code despite from living a couple of thousand miles away!
the real solution
1) parents teach their kids about safety
2) parents keep an eye on thier kids
3) erm thats it
4) no really
5) ok.. well really paranoid parents use a firewall/proxy to block myspace
besides myspace is dying out, as facebook is has moved into the teen idiot who posts pictures of themselves drunk, after dominating the same market for uni students.
I always chose the nearest select option, which I believe was afghanistan...
Are the same people who managed to put a man on the moon in charge on this project? I suspect no.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
my step daughter is 13. my wife and i decided she should be able to have a myspace page so we could know about it and monitor it. she had told us that a lot of her friends have them that their parents do not know about and they say and do all sorts of things their parents wouldn't approve of.
well my wife's ex finds out about it and reports his own daughter so they'll shut her page down. so much for parenting.
we thought it would be smart to allow it and KNOW about it so we could actually participate and make sure she was safe.
so you might want to think twice about telling your child "no". that child will probably do it anyway. and if you think blocking it on their computer at home will work - they can always go to a friends house.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
How about somebody sets up a company that provides verified email addresses. With verified, i mean age-verification. Sure it takes some time to set up an account, but then any company can use these addresses to send an age-verification email to.
Do they really not understand that kids just have to go to their freinds house, use the computer and get a free email account that mom and dad don't know about?
Just because it's easy to shut everything down doesn't mean you'd solve anything. As the other poster suggested they could just take it to facebook, or perhaps you'd see another underground(at least initially) website spring up in it's place. All stuff like this does is teach kids how to be smarter about hiding their activities.
Where do I sign up??
but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program
Maybe educating people to avoid "sexual predators online" would also educate them to identify all forms of "con artists". The latter would probably not be welcomed by many politicans.
This is going to be FUN! While all the kids secretly use Hotmail/Gmail addresses their parents don't know about, the goof offs will be submitting lists of addresses blocking their bosses, X'es and others from joining. Time to grab the popcorn, sit back and watch. This is going to be fun!
Say what you want about Texas, but aren't we the only State that skipped this fluff altogether?
I saw a "GetOutta MySpace" T-shirt on a young teenager yesterday. I think that's a pretty good sign that MySpace isn't considered "kewl" any more. Something about laserless sharks, and jumping, I think.
Hell, I'm 55 and I've had a (unupdated) MySpace page for a couple of years, that alone should make it uncool.
You're right about the publicity and lip service. There is way too much attention paid to the internet, when there are greater dangers close to home. I wrote a journal about that very topic last year, no popint in repeating it here.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Fortunately, many of us are tech-savvy, but still in an awkward situation.
As the parent of two now-grown girls I can tell you that technology has nothing to do with it. Being a parent is an awkward situation.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist
Hookers got ads? 'Scuse me while I check craigslist...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......
Someone needs a dose of reality.
My mom didn't know my high school or college assigned e-mail addresses. She doesn't know my yahoo e-mail. I'm fairly certain that she doesn't have my current work e-mail address. My dad has that one though.
My parents live about a 5-10 minute drive away. If I need to talk to them, I call or go over there. I usually only go over there during major holidays and never call them. Mom has my home phone and the wife's cell phone. We get a phone call about every other day.
As some may have recognized,
1. Nothing will stop kids from creating alternate email addresses on yahoo/msn/aol/gmail/whatever that they could then use to sign up with myspace.
2. How/Does myspace verify that the person submitting the email address is in fact a parent, and that the email address they are submitting belongs to a minor child whom they have legal custody of?
It comes down to the simple fact that an 'email address' is not an identity tied to anything in the real world, nor is any real person limited to one, nor is there any way for a third party to know what email address(es) another person uses beyond what that person has told them. Nor should they be any of these.
Exactly. I wonder how much bashing the Texas Attorney General is going to get for being the only state not to sign the agreement? He basically said it was worthless without any kind of age verification system.
"Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney
I guess it comes down to the fact that a rapist is going to commit his crime no matter what. They will find a way to do it and you can't prevent it, just hope it doesn't happen(and try to make it so that it doesn't happen to your child). What you can do is make it easier for the person trying to commit the crime to get caught. That is the best way to stop this kind of thing to happen. Thats why I like those programs the police setup where they fake being 12 years old or something and get the guy to come to them and arrest them. Those programs I think do wonders in early prevention(or at least I hope it's early enough).
On that same note you don't want to be sending your kid down a dark ally in the middle of slum town at 4 in the morning to get you smokes. Thats just plain stupid, and setting a target on someones back. I guess what I'm saying is there is a distinctive difference between preventative measures and being over protective. I'm not a parent and so I can't guess where this one falls.
Same here. Our computers are all in an open common area, visible from the kitchen, living room and dining room. Preventing him from using the internet won't teach him how to use the internet wisely. He has to have room to explore, and a watchful eye to keep him from getting into trouble.
That said, I have every intention of keeping tabs on my son's browsing habits using what ever tools are necessary. I don't intend to spy and attack, but to use it as a tool to better understand my son. I know when I was a kid, back in the BBS days, I had friends online that I would discuss stuff with that I never would have told my parents, and really, life would have been better if I had discussed it with them.
Fact is, my son will with all likelihood smoke a joint, and drink booze, both well before he turns 18. If I know about these events in his life, I can use them to ground lessons of responsibility. Whether it's planning a nature hike the morning after a planned under-aged drinking party, or maybe a viewing of 'Train Spotting' after the first joint. Both of those would put us in a position where we would be together, in a good position to talk, and have an immediate relevance to him. And that to me is worth 1000 times more than being able to scold him for looking at porno.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
In other words, this decision will have no effect on anything whatsoever, and is therefore better than most decisions and almost miraculously good for a think-of-children -decision. Keep up the good work, AGs !
BTW. Am I the only one who is getting a bit creeped out by how the US politicians are always thinking of children ? Perhaps they should be given pretty young - but of legal age - "personal assistants" before we get a repeat of the pedophile priest scandal ? Or maybe they should make more official visits to Japan.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Who says people are going to put in their kid's email?
How does myspace know that it is MY KID'S email? Does the kid verify and if they do what's to stop them from saying "No"?
Couldn't anyone put in anyone else's email address and effectively block them from mySpace?
On top of what everyone else has said about how ubiquitous free email addresses are, how is this thing useful at all.
Does anyone want to do a countdown until someone harvests all the email addresses posted on mySpace (they're there) and then registers them with the parental control?
I may sound crazy, and I maybe a bit overboard on suggesting this... but.. how about, you don't let your kids have a myspace profile. I know, I know, it takes effort to monitor.. and you may actually have to "punish" them if they disobey and create one, and I know it might harm their fragile little inner self that they can't have everything their way...
You know what, forget I mentioned it. I apologize for being so callous for recommending such harsh treatment of a child. It is the Government and Myspace responsibility.
Awesome!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not only that, kids these days have issues.
Some teenagers (and younger...) kids will go out and actively search for pedos on purpose to:
Have some kicks
Get back at daddy
Get attention
Problem is kids are dumb, and some of them get in too far over their heads.
Pedophiles are the modern witches. Sure, there may be a few out there, but I'll be damned if the majority of our kids and parents don't have problems that need fixing too. Society needs to stop bending over backwards for children and their parents.
Won't somebody think of the non-spawning adults?
Child worship sucks.
Hitler knew "think if the children" was an extremely powerful weapon. I'd search for the quote, but I'm at work...
The only people who have any real *right* to privacy are the people who are willing *and* able to do something about the matter. Typically, this also entails having the ability to support yourself and not live with anyone else, which typically cuts children out of the loop. Any other notion of so called "privacy" is largely an illusion, and is simply something people may afford to one another as a form of implied mutual trade.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So it will be this person's job to surf MySpace for porn?
That's gotta look great on a resume.
WOW, a long list of email addresses for people under 18. Sounds like a great list for target marketing.
Because you want it to fail. Nothing brings parents to arms quicker than the failure of the government to protect the children of the nation. When this system fails parents will scream from the tops of their legislator's lungs for a system that works. What system will prevent certain people from logging into the internet, or joining sites based on age? A system that knows everyone's identities. That is the only way, and that is what people all over America will scream for after systems like this one fail. There will be interviews on the Today Show with affected teenagers. Undercover reporters circumventing the system. Reformed pedophiles showing how they can do anything they want on the net for the cameras with a fuzzy blob over their faces and voices disguised. This is just another chink in the armor of the anonymous, free, open, democratic internet.
"Hey, MySpace doesn't let me create an account! Dumb parents!"
"That's OK. Go to this other place which will let you."
1. Pay attention to where "kids, these days" are going.
2. Invest heavily in that company before the critical mass.
3. Profit!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I do not consider the proposed safety measures set by MySpace to be strong enough. In my opinion a safe social network would be a site that does not have a chat room, does not allow profanity and lewd or sexual comments - as well as racial slurs and other hate speech, pornographic material and protects the privacy of it's members. I am not a tech nerd or a college student but a middle aged grandmother. For the past couple of years, I wanted to join a social network so I could share stuff with my friends and family. But I had been unable to find what I consider a "safe social network". So, in September 2007, I created a safe social network called Our-Social.com. Our-Social.com (www.our-social.com) is a clean safe alternative to the prominent social networking sites. It has a word filter that prevents members from being exposed to profanity and lewd or sexual comments - as well as racial slurs and other hate speech. To further ensure that the site remains clear of offensive material and is safe for all ages, all pictures, video and audio clips go through an approval process - which takes places within 24 hours of submission - before they are posted. In addition, Our-Social discourages members from ever publicly displaying information such as their e-mail address and full name. As another safety precaution, Our-Social does not have a chat area but does provide a members-only forum. The forum is moderated and has several different threads under the main categories of Family, Health, Faith, Pets and Social Stuff. Members have their own account pages, which serve as personalized control panels, where users can manage all aspects of their account. Management activities include editing profiles, setting privacy levels for the account, creating or editing articles, checking mail, inviting friends to join, sending out friendship requests, a calendar and creating numerous picture, video and audio albums. The calendar is especially handy for anyone who would like to create a page for a group of people. With the calendar you can keep everyone in you group informed of any upcoming events.
Do you think your son is stupid? Maybe if he's stupid this approach will work.
But if he's not stupid, he knows how to operate under your radar. He knows how to delete objectionable websites out of the browser history. He knows not to just get up and walk away from the computer with the porn website up.
Fact of the matter is, kids are smart. They know what you think is objectionable, they know why you think it's objectionable, and because they know this, they're going to go do it anyway. Fortunately, because they're smart, they're also probably smart enough to keep out of trouble (teens looking at porn on the internet never hurt them or anyone else), but if you think they're not doing what you've said they shouldn't do 'just because', you're fooling yourself.
Trust me. I spent 10 years exploiting the trust of my parents, teachers, etc. It's amazing what you can do when everyone assumes you're a 'good kid'.
paintball
As many slashdotters have pointed out, this would never worked.
The real solution is to ask all pedophiles to register their email addresses so that they can be blocked.
...if only to see the look on the faces of all those teenage girls who log in one day to find their page is missing its background, most of the images, and half their personal photographs due to the removal of "pornographic content."
Who placed blame on you? I cannot comprehend the kind of poor comprehension that would lead to that conclusion.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Having been on the receiving end, I cannot accept that reasoning. I've had that thrown at me all too many times by everyone from counselors to relatives, that somehow I have to share any blame because I must have asked for it or deserved it or simply because I "let him do it". All you critics who have never been manhandled by someone so much bigger and stronger than you are have no idea what you are talking about.
I do not doubt that you are not to blame for what has happened for you and I fear you have jumped on my statement due you your obvious and understandable anger and people who accuse you of such.
The point I was making was a response to a statement which appeared to claim that there was no external factors to a rape other than the rapist himself - which in my view was obviously false. However the notion of having influence over an event is not the same as being to blame for it. As an example in an car accident both drivers have influence over events, but only one might be to blame for the negative results.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Disclaimer: I have an 8yo boy (L) and a 2yo girl (R) and I consider myself a nice parent.
That said, if I tell L (for whatever reason) that his computer privileges are suspended by one week, I am quite sure he will refrain from using any of the five computers we have at home, and that he will not use it at school or at some friend's house (only other place he goes besides school and extracurricular activities). That is because we do have a relationship of trust that _both_ of us treasure, and I intend to keep it that way.
Even so, sometimes I overlook what he is doing -- via proxy logs, packet sniffing or any other means I think will be effective -- as a way to help him keeping himself out of trouble (altough he has a good notion of internet survival -- not entering home address at websites and stuff like that) and as a way to detect any intervention-needing situation (the "Talk" about flowers and birds, for instance...) And he _knows_ I do that. It's not a secret. I explained to him in no uncertain terms that it is for his protection.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048