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What Filters Are Right For Kids?
WaywardGeek writes "My daughter is using phrases like 'hot guys,' and soon will have a chat about the birds and the bees. I believe in letting kids discover the world as it is, and have no Internet controls on any of our systems, which are mostly Linux based. However, it's not fair for aggressive porn advertisers to splash sex in her face without her permission. My question is: What Linux-based Internet filtering solution do Slashdot dads favor, and do they hinder a child's efforts to learn about the world?"
Keep the computer in the living room.
No Longer a Menace to Society.
Alexandria Morrigan born 2/22/01 l. 20.5in wt. 7 lbs. 5 oz.
I never, ever see porn ads because I've got Adblock Plus installed in FF. If she prefers IE for some weird reason then just put an ad-filtering web-proxy on your network like Junkbuster.
Redirect all outbound connection attempts on port 80 through your router to that proxy and you'll be good to go. That way she won't have porn ads splashed in her face but she'll still be able to Google for hot guys with SafeSearch turned off :).
Nick
That seems reasonable enough. If your daughter isn't actually going looking for porn.
If she is, you need to have a talk. Not porn=bad because that won't work. Rather: porn=unrealistic. And that she needs to understand that much of what she will see is the result of payment to foolish and desperate people.
Oh, and build up her self-esteem. That is the critical factor in teen girls getting into situations they're not ready for.
-1, totally missing the point. The OP specifically wants to let his kid explore. However, exploring kids are quite likely to wind up places THEY don't want to be, once they start looking around. I'm sure you can think of a few search terms that might give you relevant, useful information on Wikipedia...but that you might not ever want to type into GIS. Heck, my reading of the question was more like "How can I let her wander the internet ON HER OWN, going wherever she wants, without having to call me in to close a barrage of pop-up windows".
And we all turned out alright.
Your kids are gonna find out. Accept it. The right approach is education. And not retarded "well, ya see, when a boy and girl really, really like each other" education. Real education. And approval thereof. Tell them about condoms. Tell them about birth control. Tell them about a pumpkin-sized blood-covered creature ripping out of the girl's crotch leaving behind so much damage that the doctor quits using stitches and opts to replace everything with a steel plate.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It may go against conventional wisdom on Slashdot, but filters don't particularly hinder a child's efforts to learn about the world. If there is something that they want to see, they can ask you if it's ok and you can unblock it. That's the 21st century version of the way that parents used to do it. Part of being a parent is being a gatekeeper. Some information your kids just need to be largely innocent of until they become adults. It's one thing to know that the ugly side of the world exists. It's another thing to take few measures to stop your kids from participating in it out of curiosity.
With those two in place she will never see a dirty picture she didn't look for. More than once I have recommended a site (usually a hacking or cracking site) to a friend and had them remark on how much porn advertising was on the site and all the porn popup ads. I hadn't even realized it because I was using AdBlock[er] and NoScript and wasn't seeing any of that.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
He's just looking for an ad filter, he's clearly stated that he doesn't want to censor the internet.
Good for him too, I started online at the age of twelve in 94' (NCSA Mosiac FTW!) and eventually figured out how to setup a USEnet client. Abpe.* and all its life lessons (women do that with horses??) followed. I made a bit of money by selling those lessons on floppy disk at school too, it was a step above the random porn mags that seem to litter all the woods in this country!
Nick
A parent asking for advice about filtering software by no means implies that they are not living up to their responsibilities and your entire post presuming such is in bad taste.
As far as "filters" for kids - I grew up with a liberal(ish) mother who taught Sexual Education courses for a while. I was exposed to all of her programs, from "abstinence only" to "safer sex" and everything in between, and to be honest, what I learned from that level of exposure is that the BEST defense is a good offense. Teach your kid the values of sexuality you feel are healthiest and know that no matter how much you try to keep them protected from exposure to "bad" things, they are going to find those things on their own, one way or another. Giving kids the proper tools and knowledge on how to deal with the "bad things" is far better than trying to protect them with any sort of shell.
--- He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. ---
They aren't born with one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mod parent up!
A parents job is not to shadow their children around 24x7 for the first 18 years of their life, that is just absurd, and part of the general "paranoia" that our culture seems to be cultivating right now.
A parents job is to establish a safe environment in which their children can grow up in, and learn how to be an adult in.
If he's any good he will ensure that dns traffic can only goto opendns, then she wont be able to simply change the dns herself. More importantly, what happens when dad needs to use the computer? I'd rather let my daughter look at porn than block myself from looking at it as well!
Why is it such a strong meme in the slashdot community that it is ok for an adult to use adblock to protect him or her from obtrusive advertisements, but doing the same thing for a child is either censorship or abdicating parental responsibility?
I'm not saying that children should live in a perfectly sanitized world, but there are only so many times that you can say "That's a porn site, dear, just ignore it", before you want to install adblock.
It's this funny thing about being a parent... you see, you have other things to do than be your child's content censor all day long. I'm a single father of four, and I also have to do things like cook dinner, help my other children with their homework, clean, go to the bathroom, etc. etc. If I were to attempt to monitor my children's Internet usage like you demand, they would get to use the Internet... oh, around 15 minutes a week. Maybe.
Now, maybe in some elevated sense of the word I "ought" to be able to watch each of my four children like a hawk, all the time. But I can't, and a bit of content filtering allows my kids to get the benefits of Internet access without me having to be a content Nazi.
(And before you criticize me for having four children, originally my wife was a stay-at-home mother, but she died of cancer. So frankly if you want to blame me for having too many kids you can go to hell. There is something sick about a society that insists on a level of public depravity that makes it impossible for parents to have enough children to even maintain its population.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
What mean "we", Kemosabe?
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Sure they are. It's just a Bayesian classifier. It needs to be trained.
My daughter is using phrases like 'hot guys,' and soon will have a chat about the birds and the bees
Since there isn't always a clear red flag to let you know the absolute last minute you can put that conversation off, you should get it out of the way when the time is approaching. Procrastination here is not a good thing.
By the time my parents worked up the nerve, my school had already provided me with good sex-ed. I think in some respects I knew more than they did, which was kinda funny. Correcting your parents during this chat just makes them turn different shades of red and purple. Not many schools do that though, but if you wait too long you too may get to experience that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I never understood parents that want to filter their kids internet connection. They'll have to live with the fact that the world is a bad place, and they should learn that naturally - not all at once when they turn 18 and you kick them out.
Based on the article, he doesn't think she is ready yet and when she is he will happily reduce the filtering or remove it altogether.
This is exactly the sort of responsible and appropriate response that should be encouraged, by the way. We make our own decisions about what we want censored, and we take action to filter it. No running to the Nanny State and demanding that they protect the children.
There is such a thing as age-appropriate. Children are not born being able to handle all the good, bad, and ugly the world has to offer. As they develop intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally, they'll be able to handle more and more. It's up to the parents to filter their exposure until they can handle different things.
www.joshferguson.org
Just my meaningless 2 cents
4-8, fair enough
8-12, kids start talking about it. They should have the talk before they and their friends hit puberty or you will find your words mostly redundant by the time they get it.
12-16, like it or not, if they want it enough then they'll get it, and they'll find a way to keep you from finding out about it most of the time. Though it's fair to say that they should at least be trying to keep it a secret. I was browsing Usenet by 13 and IRC by 14, and there's a lot more options today.
16, forget it. If they want it, they'll have it, and if they aren't dumb, you probably won't know about it.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The worst thing you could possibly do is to try and block her attempts to get to content she really wants to get to.
However blocking accidental is really easy: remove IE if you haven't already, install Firefox if you haven't already and get the Ad Block Plus addon and subscribe to the EasyList USA blacklist. Ads.. what are ads?
now... just be honest and straight up with her about the birds and the bees.. and if she wants to look at stuff.. well she is going to look at stuff. It's not unhealthy, despite what our unhealthy prudish sexually-repressive culture wants to say.
(OMG! my 10 year old saw a titty on a movie! he's going to be a mass murderer now!)
Caveat: I am not a parent YET, but don't expect to change my opinions on this by the time i have kids of that age.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
When my daughter was 10, she woke me up in the middle of the night crying. We had watched Disney's Mulan-- cartoon about a Chinese girl-- and that night she went on the Internet without permission and found an "Asian Girls!" porn site that was pretty graphic. She said "Why do they let this happen to themselves? Don't they know they have a beautiful culture?"
We talked and talked that night. I told her how glad I was that she came to me with such questions. And as expected her curiosity was roused. She would later go looking up various porn sites, eventually getting one of those Trojans that had our computer silently dialing up some Soviet state and running up a phone bill of over $1000 because it stayed online in the background, all because she so easily signed in as "Over 18."
We refused to pay that bill and the phone company finally conceded because I quoted some legal precedent I found online and because I was articulate and talked tough.
So, get ready for anything. Your best defense really IS being able to talk to your kid, checking her browser history, etc. I suggest that, when you are telling her about sex, you find legitimate sex-ed web sites for her that are appropriate to her age-- they are out there. That will give her something to look at when she gets curious and kids need access to healthy imagery because the most important message I think they need is that porn sex is not real sex. (I know some smart mouth out there will make a crack about "real, etc.," but little girls do not need to imagine porn scenarios when wondering what it will be like to grow up and make babies.
My kid would later comment about the porn sites that she visited:
"Those girls all have on that 'commercial face' they have when they lie down on cars or advertise toothpaste-- 'Yum! It tastes minty fresh!'-- WHY?"
Why, indeed?
Just keep talking to your kid. And make sure she also knows some other adult she can go to with questions too embarrassing to ask you, probably a female." Good luck and thank you for caring about your kid in this way.