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iPhone's New Parental Controls Block Sex Ed, Allow Violence and Racism (vice.com)
samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: The parental controls in the iPhone's new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter. The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for "explicit" content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to "limit adult websites." As tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform.
The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.
The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.
This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
You can show decapitations during prime time, but one flash of a nipple and the FCC will fine you $325,000.
No.
The 1st ammendment allows slashdot to delete or block that crap, not the government.
Just flag the post and move on.
you're doing the parenting thing wrong.
Steve Jobs himself wouldn't let his own kids anywhere near an iPhone or an iPad.
That's because it looks at content. Sex ed is generally not distinguishable from porn without understanding the text, violence is visual, not something a text parser can find, and racist content requires understanding the text unless they use racial epithets.
This is funny because I remember the days when people were against making blocklists of websites and now they're complaining they can't get them!
Believe it or not, Racism won't inpregnate my daughter.
I really don't understand this kind of thing. It's just fine to see the most horrific violence imaginable, but you can't see someone's penis or breasts. What the hell?
Is it just me, or would the more ideal world be where this is completely reversed?
growing up to be a violent neo-nazi. They _do_ worry about them getting knocked up or knocking somebody up. Plus if you're religious birth control often isn't an option. So when your only tools a hammer...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What do you have against Oompa Loompas? You want Willie Wonka to send them back and get eaten by Vermicious Knids?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What do you expect from a company that constantly flubs the switch to and from standard time?
Simple things like this are the reason I don't fear AI taking over any time soon. After 25+ years of trying, internet filters still don't work. After 20 years of trying, predictive text is no better than it was in 1999.
sustainable living
FTFY, how about just state the facts instead of sensationalizing everything. Honestly anyone that knows anything about how the internet works should only be surprised when filtering actually works as intended.
as a libertarian Im all for having more tools, as a parent, to decide what is and what is not ok. Obviously there are some good things to the internet in terms of research power, etc. And there is a whole lot of bad shit too. The more granular and more power I have to exempt or ban specific things that slip through, or get caught by, a filter is never a bad thing. Having the tools gives the parents to choose how much or how little to implement. Ultimately its still their choice. If letting your 6yr old watch the original Jurrasic Park (R) in the theatre because its about dinosaurs is ok with you, well Im not the one who has to deal with the kids traumatized with nightmares. Thats on them. Me, well I'm trying to keep my kids maintaining a healthy baseline of normalcy without trying to stiffel them more than absolutely necessary to prevent them obtaining some unhealthy or unrealistic view/opinion on things.
what about the breast cancer test?
Last time I checked the "left loonies" are the ones that have less problems with their kids knowing how their body works than their kids being subjected to hate and violence.
So... I guess you're barking up the wrong tree here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Parent of almost 2 year old twin toddlers here.
Currently they don’t play with ipad etc, they are too young, better to play with physical things and explore at home or in the playground or in nature.
Together as a family, since a month we watch on youtube streamed to tv for 15 minutes max daily, animated songs like The Wheels on The bus. They love that, and we sing (badly in my case) with them. Otherwise tv is off all day.
But how to address things when they get older? I am not adverse to parental controls - there is a time for everything. Indeed porn seems to have slipped from the erotical to rather extreme stuff. I wouldn’t want my kids at say 8 years old, when they search for “pussy”, to see a hand stuck up a vagina. For example.
The world can be a violent place, I don’t want them to be too sheltered but again there is a time for everything, and nobody at any age needs to stumble upon a decapitation video.
We plan to lovingly guide our kids through the discovery of the online world, and warn them about dangers, and i find that parental controls once the bugs are substantially ironed out, can help. You can’t always be present, and it is healthy that kids explore on their own, but they Shoukd not be scarred at a young age.
Blacklists and keyword filters (what Apple is trying to do) *never* work like you think they will. The WWW is far, far, far too big and complicated for any such grandiose scheme to ever hope to tame. Even a site like Wikipedia is far too diverse, frank, and complex (I have seen plenty of shocking things there not suitable for children).
The only thing that works is a whitelist- allowing one to visit ONLY the specifically sites in an approved list. Of course, this is extremely restrictive and often not practical. Personally, I would not allow young children unsupervised access to non-whitelisted web, ever. As they get older, I would continuously expand the whitelist until eventually flipping over to a blacklist.
Here in the U.S., sex is taboo, and heaven forbid we try to teach it to our children. Violence and racism? Those are prime time material, and OK to show to anyone of any age.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
So my mom wants sex with me and I google: "how to say no to sex" ... with no result.
Obviously my next search is: "how to poison my mom"!!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Because of the walled garden, and more rarley due to the way rating are done on film software, in a way the US culture kinda enforce its standard on the rest of the world. Which leads to the groaning you can see.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I keep trying, but my new iPad doesn't show any results.
As a parent, I was more worried about the stifling of the children in that statement. But I suppose we should be grateful that it is not unnecessary.
Perfectly congruent with a society blurring out mouths on TV when it says a "naughty" word and freaking out over half a nipple, while at the same time having the biggest porn industry in the world and seemingly having no big problems with violence in general...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
lol. Poe's Law in full effect right there ...
... not intended for littlke children.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
as a libertarian
Me, well I'm trying to keep my kids maintaining a healthy baseline of normalcy without trying to stiffel them more than absolutely necessary to prevent them obtaining some unhealthy or unrealistic view/opinion on things.
You don't see the irony?
Ezekiel 23:20
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
While I agree with you in principle, it's more complicated than that precisely for the frequency reasons you state. There are real consequences to sex (pregnancy, disease, etc) which most people are very likely to run into in some capacity, often before they are really sufficiently mature to deal with them appropriately. So some amount of caution clearly is warranted albeit probably not the ridiculous extremes we go to. It's obvious that a lot of people (including an alarming number of full grown adults) are incapable of behaving rationally when presented with sexually suggestive media much less the real thing. Given that they are going to run into situations in their life numerous times one has to be careful. It's similar reasoning to why we have separate men's and women's bathrooms. In principle it shouldn't matter but in practice it does. I agree we should celebrate depictions of affection but how we do so responsibly is sometimes quite challenging.
On the other hand very few people are likely to actually even witness much less be a part of an actual shooting or war so there is a degree of the abstract in putting those activities on screen. Not to mention that movie violence looks pretty much nothing like the real thing. You could watch the Avengers all day long because the consequences of the "violence" are so nerfed they make it into little more than a dance recital. Violence is and should be FAR more horrifying to see on TV but in real life it is generally somewhat less of a problem for most of the population.
There isn’t actually any such rating as X or XXX, those are porn marketing terms only. The closest actual rating is NC-17.
NC-17 is a relatively recent thing. There did used to be a X rating (never XXX though) but it got co-opted by the porn industry to such a degree that they had to change it to something less... promotional. I forget when NC-17 became official but it was within the last 20-30 years.
What does any of this have to do with knowing how to fuck?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You must be new here. GNAA is a slashdot troll
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That sound in line with USA mentality
Sounds like the adult content filter it's working as intended..
How exactly are "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" adult sites?
It's news for nerds, you know.... stuff that matters.
I have no idea how the iOS 12 parental controls are implemented (my youngest is 14 and moving out of the age where I'm all that concerned about his web browsing - which mainly seems to consist of schoolwork and Twitch streams of Plants vs Zombies), but it really should be implemented in terms of frameworks.
It's fine if Apple implements a "default" implementation of that framework but in the end they shouldn't want to be in the business of deciding what's appropriate or inappropriate. Rather, create a store where parents can subscribe to various filter feeds (similar to Adblock/uBlock) and let them choose what's appropriate. Some parents are going to be OK with sex ed and horrified by gun instruction and vice versa - no need to jump into that cultural minefield.
Why any company would want to be seen as a gatekeeper in beyond me. There are plenty of organizations and groups that are happy to fill that niche - and by giving users choice, you remove yourself from the culture wars. Unless, of course, that's your goal - but that seems like a bad business decision.
Christian adult controls
but seriously, rare situations should be ignored. The number of children intentionally poisoning anybody is below a rounding error.
The annoying part of American Puritan hypocrisy is that any censoring is pointless in the USA because both sex and violence are heavily promoted in the culture in the most influential ways possible WITHOUT being explicit! The damage is largely being done while ignorantly being "clean" and "safe" because they fail to realize being explicit is just being literal minded. Beeping a swearword out when everybody fills in the blank does nothing; if anything it amplifies the impact. Soft porn is PG and on broadcast TV and has more impact on kids. The culture is engineered to give into temptation because good consumers are impulsive; that alone promotes more sex and violence directly.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You learned how from your phone?
I'm waiting for the part where you explain the importance of the women's cycling race winner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It isn't anywhere near as important as the demographic fact that the sexual revolution has caused dangerously low population growth in the first world, and even worse, has caused huge amounts of ignorance and superstition to overwrite wisdom among anybody younger than 90. The chaos caused by that makes the woman's cycling race being won by a man who was pretending to be a woman just a blip in the ether.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.