Slashdot Mirror
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?
The right way is to talk to your kids about these things. Give examples of scams, tell them there is porn, there is violence, and always, always if they feel unsure about something they should talk to you (Mostly for scams, I'm pretty sure they'll handle porn. Hell, even weird porn isn't as bad as seeing ISIS chop someones head off). Software protection is just a crutch, the real protection is education and vigilance.The right way is to talk to your kids about these things. Give examples of scams, tell them there is porn, there is violence, and always, always if they feel unsure about something they should talk to you (Mostly for scams, I'm pretty sure they'll handle porn. Hell, even weird porn isn't as bad as seeing ISIS chop someones head off). Software protection is just a crutch, the real protection is education and vigilance.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
By definition. And if you think about it, you'll notice why.
The "enemies" in this battle is you vs. your child. Your goal: To keep your kid from seeing stuff it's not supposed to see. Your kid's goal: To do whatever it wants and to ignore that rule you imposed.
You have finite means and finite time at your hands to implement something supposed to be blocking your child. Your child has WAY more amount of time at his or her hands (think about when they come home from school vs. when you come from work). They also have a pool of peers to draw information from, and in this pool the ability to bypass parental control is quite a bit of a status symbol, while you relying on your peers is probably not that useful since asking for help because your kids outsmart you is much but certainly NOT a status symbol.
If everything else fails, if you are really the ultimate computer guru who can lock down your kids' computers and smartphones, all they have to do is spend the day with li'l Timmy from across the street whose parents don't know jack about computers, and who can't keep Timmy (and in turn your kids) from seeing whatever they please. Which is, again, something Timmy will certainly and gladly agree to, since as stated above, outsmarting your parents and ignoring their rules is a status symbol.
In other words, the deck is stacked against you. The sensibly move is not to play.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Before all the other idiot comments like this, nobody is denying that supervision and education are the first thing, but as said in the summary, parents have limited time, and children have many ways of accessing the web.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank my father, and my friends' dads who left their porno stashes in obvious places and didn't ever bitch about it unless we took too many and didn't bring them back.
Thanks to all the cool dads out there who realized that even though we weren't 3rd world children, we should get to checkout some nudity as part of our natural adolescence -- I mean, why else would we have the interest to do so?
Also, thanks to the local BBSs which had far shittier porn, but digitized versions of The Anarchist's Cook Book, Steal This Book, and Phreaking / Hacking guides, the latter of which my parents surely would not have approved of, but without which I wouldn't have a leg-up in the lucrative career I occupy today.
In short: Fuck off parents. 3rd world kids help do the work of carrying water, collecting firewood, and butchering animals for meals at young ages while seeing nudity constantly -- Why would you want your kids to have LESS knowledge about life and less skills than children of 3rd world nations? Admit it: You don't know what's good for your kids. It's a damn good think you can't keep them from seeing anything they want online.
Yeah I guess "how to detect an alien invasion" was more useful. Anyway I don't know why a parent should not be a good parent if he looks for extra means of protecting his children, other than what you can do every day. But asking something sensible here is like asking the drunkens at the bar.
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
There is also a group of people (apparently a very small minority) that believe that sex isn't automatically evil, and it is the prohibitions that lead to deviancy and perversion and many of the other evils that plague us.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”