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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.
Cheesecloth works pretty good to get the chunks out.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Filter or no filter, its just bad for them especially at that age.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Seriously, if all you are worried about is her getting porn ads when she doesn't want them, just use adblock.
Monstar L
Um . . . "splash sex in her face" . . . oooooh-kaaaaaay . . .
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
If he wants a filter that is more difficult to bypass by the child, Privoxy is pretty handy.
I suggest you filter all your daughter's internet queries through a time machine that leads to a not so distant past where "splash in her face" was not a part of the male collective consciousness.
Use openDNS and set up an account. Point your router's DNS settings to their servers. It allows a few different levels of filtering. You can change the levels of filtering as she grows older.
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 should scare her away for a couple of decades.
Just change your DNS servers to OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com/) and register your IP with them. You can use their category-based filtering to block the pr0n. Block adware, malware, and phishing while you're at it. Oh, and enjoy a faster DNS service and extensive stats pages. If you are worried about a dynamic IP from your ISP, don't be: most ISP's preferentially reassign IPs to customers instead of switching it up. Happy censoring!
Her interest in sex is pretty much limited to looking at cute guys in her class and in teen magazines.
Girls aren't as affected by the visual stimulation from porn ads. At least not to the extent that boys are.
She's not going to be any better off because you start filtering her internet. It's like wrestling a pig. It's dirty and tiresome and just pisses the pig off.
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.
Adblock for Firefox should keep out most of the unwanted ads. The best thing you can do is keep the computer in the living room but try and let her have as much privacy as possible.
-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.
Being Linux, you're likely using FireFox or one of it's builds (eg. Debian's IceWeasel). I recommend the AdBlock add-on, and possibly the NoScript add-on as well. In the process of blocking ads in general, AdBlock's going to get most of the porn ads as well. Set up bogofilter for e-mail filtering and you'll quickly get all the spam (including all the porn spam) diverted into a junk folder (Thunderbird has similar filtering built-in with it's junk-mail flagging feature, I use bogofilter mainly because I alternate between Thunderbird and Pine as my mail readers and want the junk-mail filtering to happen regardless of which one I'm using at the moment). That should take care of the majority of the problem. What's left will be search result spam, and those are mostly obvious from reading the result without having to visit the site to find out.
NOW.
Filter out the obvious stuff. You won't stop a dedicated teen from finding what they want, but you can try to stop them from getting things they don't want that are inappropriate.
I have a daughter and a son, and yes, knowing there will be a day when my kids are looking for 'Hot [Gender of choice]' scares the shit out of me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Today mine got up at 5 a.m. My answer would have to be, "coffee filters".
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. ---
DansGuardian
Either put it on their desktop or install on a server if they use OSX/Microsoft windows.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
They aren't born with one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, something like that exists for Linux and any OS that uses DNS - check out OpenDNS.
http://www.opendns.com/
You can configure what levels of filters to use and even customize the page that opendns supplies when a forbidden link is clicked.
They are also working to block some of the botnet phone homes.
All you need to do is use their name servers. You can set up an account and configure what gets blocked and what doesn't.
Also check out an enhanced hosts file at http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm.
That will block a lot of requests from ever leaving the computer. You can also add in whatever others you want as well.
I only whitelist the sites that teach good lessons for their development into adulthood:
Zombo.com: You can do ANYTHING there.
Goatse: What better way to show what one can accomplish if you put your mind to it?
2G1C: Teamwork and empowerment
Lemonparty: Appreciation for the elderly.
I'd list more, but CPS is here. Must be donation season or something.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I got open internet access when I was 12, saw a lot of porn, it didn't scar me. Of course I saw a lot of mags before that. I understand your concern, but images of people having sex probably aren't going to make your kids crazy. Young bonobos see the adults go at it all the time, they seem to turn out OK. What you don't want is her being too young and actually having sex; that should be the focus of your conversation with her.
You're a sick bastard for saying what everyone else was only thinking.
You demand that the government censor the entire internet for the safety of The Children!
;)
If the OP is using a linux router/gateway machine, why not use something as simple as squid-guard?
http://www.squidguard.org/
http://www.squid-cache.org/
Blacklists here: http://www.shallalist.de/
It allows for customization (trusted/untrusted) and seems to be very effective. Good luck!
Foxfilter is a password protected firefox content filter. So unless you have another browser installed it should do the job. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4351
I can say with certainty that I sincerely doubt I was damaged in any way by getting the birds & bees understanding at the tender age of 3. In fact, I suspect that I ended up with significantly healthier attitudes, because when my classmates were going gaga over boobs I was more wondering what the big deal was.
"The innocence of childhood" is a concept used to protect parents from the thought that their kids are going to grow up and have sex. It has nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with making adults think they're protecting kids.
I am officially gone from
Extra Slim Filter Tips should definitely be considered when purchasing filters.
Actually there is good deal on at Amazon currently only £11.99: Extra Slim Filter.
I'm a bit worried about the 4 used & new available from £5.85
sudo apt-get install pr0nfilter
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
find out what her reasons are, why she wants to look at hot guys.
Ummmm, let me guessssssss.... DNA? Why do I enjoy looking at hot girls?
A GOOD father would train their daughter from an early age to be interested in GEEKY guys.
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.
Privoxy. http://www.privoxy.org/
Solves all the problems with accidental advertising porn.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been a single father for most of the past sixteen years. I did hardly anything to screen out offensive material when my daughter was younger. Not only that, I let her have her own computer in her room, so I wasn't there to watch over her shoulder either.
What I did do was set up transparent proxying through Squid on the Linux box that runs as our house firewall so I could scan the logs from time to time and see where she was going. She knew that her usage was being logged, but beyond that I did nothing at all. In reality a much bigger problem than porn was the extent to which supposedly kid-friendly sites actually contained a large proportion of drive-by installs mostly for advertising crap. I ended up with a Squid acl list largely composed of places like atwola.com and Gator. I never had to add a block for any site containing pornographic or other questionable materials. After a couple of rounds of cleaning this type of junk off her (then Windows) computer, I decided the only solution was to block it at the router. These days she uses Ubuntu, so adware is much less of a problem.
The bigger problem actually began when I let her have an email account (indeed she owns her own domain). Despite years of experience scanning email for myself and my clients, it was still impossible to keep the occasional attached gif from getting through. Unfortunately these tend to the more disgusting end of the porn spectrum; I would have been less disturbed by her seeing more conventional sexual behaviors. The couple of times this happened she mentioned it to me and said she had deleted the offending message immediately. We had a talk about not opening messages from people you didn't know, but often a graphic will show up in the message preview windows (in Thunderbird in our case) without any active choice by the reader.
Now I only have the one girl, so I don't know how generalizable this experience might be. I do know that, at seventeen, she harbors little or no interest in porn and had, if anything, even less interest in it at 11-13. If she were male, the story might have been different. However my attitudes about her Internet usage were consistent with the general degree of freedom I permitted her in other realms of life. She always had a lot of freedom and today seems much more mature and self-disciplined than some of her friends and acquaintances who grew up in stricter households. I'm proud to call her my daughter.
I use dansguardian on Hardy Heron for filtering my daughter's access. I like the fact that I can adjust just what gets blocked as she gets older.
However, I do believe the best filter is the one where parents practice that ago old filter of "No, you can't do that".
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.
It's rare that I win the race to say something first on the internet. I am soooo proud today.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Every good product is actually just a lie the customer wants to hear.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
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.
SquidGuard
It's what I use at home for my kids. No, it's not perfect, but along with some good URL re-write rules, you can't get to any porn unless you REALLY try.
'Impossible' is a word that humans use far too often. -- Seven of Nine
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!