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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.
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!
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.
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
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
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?
You demand that the government censor the entire internet for the safety of The Children!
;)
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.
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.
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