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.
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.
I'd like to see the parents asking their twelve year old girl what her email address is so they can lock down her myspace account and see where they went wrong when their child responds with "sweetltlhottie69@hotmail".
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.
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.
I'd like to see the parents asking their twelve year old girl what her email address is so they can lock down her myspace account and see where they went wrong when their child responds with "sweetltlhottie69@hotmail".
With an e-mail address like that they're going to be even more surprised to find out that their 12-year-old daughter is actually a lonely 40-year-old man.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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