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Ask Slashdot: Parental Content Control For Free OSs?
m.alessandrini writes Children grow up, and inevitably they will start using internet and social networks, both for educational and recreational purposes. And it won't take long to them to learn to be autonomous, especially with all the smartphones and tablets around and your limited time. Unlike the years of my youth, when internet started to enter our lives gradually, now I'm afraid of the amount of inappropriate contents a child can be exposed to unprepared: porn, scammers, cyberbullies or worse, are just a click away.
For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites. What about GNU/Linux? Or Android? Several solutions rely on setting up a proxy with a whitelist of sites, or similar, but I'm afraid this approach can make internet unusable, or otherwise be easy to bypass. Have you any experiences or suggestions? Do you think software solutions are only a part of the solution, provided children can learn hacking tricks better than us, and if so, what other 'human' techniques are most effective?
For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites. What about GNU/Linux? Or Android? Several solutions rely on setting up a proxy with a whitelist of sites, or similar, but I'm afraid this approach can make internet unusable, or otherwise be easy to bypass. Have you any experiences or suggestions? Do you think software solutions are only a part of the solution, provided children can learn hacking tricks better than us, and if so, what other 'human' techniques are most effective?
Apart from the tone of your message, I agree only partially on the content.
I agree that the technology is not the solution.
But supervision, as you say, is also not a complete solution.
In my experience (father of a now adult daughter), the best was to explain, discuss and educate my daughter. When my daughter was around 6/7 years old, I slowly showed her to lookup stuff on the internet, where there are interesting things and als explained her about "dangerous" and "inappropriate" content there could be.
But what was mot important was trust - i.e. I explained her that I trust her fully not to misuse the freedom I was giving her, when, at around age of 8, I allowed her to access the internet on her own. I explained her, later, about the dangers of posting inappropriate content on the internet e.g. on Facebook, or other social networks and what consequences it might have for her now or in the future.
But I always made clear that the decision would be hers, that I would always be there for her if she found something discomforting or felt that she did something discomforting and that I would help her as much as I can. I made clear, though, that there certain things where even I can't help (full disclaimer, I have strong IT/Software/Internet background) - and that the best would be that should be careful.
When she started using Social Networks, she then friended me (not me her) asking whether I could let her know if she posts something that could have negative effect on her or her future.
This was the same approach with my nephew (he is 16 now) about 4 years ago and this is the same approach with my god-son: trust, education, and help - less so "control" or "supervision" - and the funny thing in the end was that all three of them asked for some supervision when they started using social networks, etc.
Lastly: I showed all of them where they can find really interesting content that could be fun as well as where they can learn things - but this required to first understand what they really liked and were interested in (Daughter: Science, Knitting; Nephew: Singing, Police-Work; God-Son: Minecraft, Minecraft-Mods, Software-development, Games-Dev).
Hope this helps from a father, uncle, godfather
and the children have unlimited time to get around it.
Someone really needs to define "children". This conversation is an absolute mess without defining the terms we're using (include a description of the various levels of "bad" content as well).
you have already "lost" already and I don't get it how it's really different than 20 years ago. I mean, was goatse so different 20 years ago or what the fuck? bbs's were full of xxx pics and texts too, raunchier than what you would read in hustler.
I was around and of prime age when BBS's were popular, and I had two computers, but we didn't have a modem, and I didn't see anyone that had one. This has little to fuckall to do with this conversation :-)
How was it different back then? In that, there IS a huge difference. The entry age to someone getting access to these areas was MUCH different. The percentage of children under 8 that had unfettered and unrestricted access to BBS's was nearly, if not absolutely, zero. Today, the percentage of children under 8 that have unfettered and unrestricted access to the internet, often via a phone, ipod, or tablet, is significant**.
** I don't know the exact figure, but I have eyeballs. I can see enough kids with those things that I know it's non-zero.
Combine those two, and there's a solid case for internet filters. Add to that the idea of "surprise" links or posts, such as cat videos that end up being dickspin, and there is plenty of reason to have, at a minimum, some basic filters on all items with access to the internet that your kid uses.
Lastly, why the hell is everyone shying away from the actual question? Who cares about the motivation?!? Maybe he wants to sell it to people he knows? Or maybe he just wants to know what's out there for some other reason (to build something else off of those tools)? Why do you care so much about the absolutely useless part of the question, and why are you ignoring the core question?