11 ms·

I figured, when my kids were a certain age, that if I took that route, they'd ALWAYS get around whatever control I put in front of them. Either at home, or at s

I figured, when my kids were a certain age, that if I took that route, they'd ALWAYS get around whatever control I put in front of them. Either at home, or at school or at a friends house. Told them there was stuff on the internet that could harm them, that there was stuff they could NOT unsee. They're 18 now, the results of the science experiment are still out, but they seem to have turned out okay.

_fat_santa 5y ago
When I think back to when I was a kid, getting around school internet filters and helping my friends remove parental controls from their devices, I can't help but think the Streisand Effect was hard at work in my brain. The adults was determined that I wouldn't see a thing so I was determined to see it because what could they be hiding? Now approaching the age where the thought of having a family and kids is on my mind more and more, I always wonder how I will approach this problem. I can't think I would do it any differently than you. For young children sure, throw up DNS filtering at the router level and the kiddos' will be none the wiser. But if my future kid ever turns out like me, that will probably only work until 7 or 8 (when I figured out how routers worked), at that point I would think it has to be an honest conversation about all the crap on the internet. Even when I was a kid I knew when the adults were feeding me a load of crap.
- mlyle 5y ago
  What do you think schools should do? I teach at a school (K-12), and there's definitely circumvention of technical controls at the high school level. But I can't help but think we're a whole better off because of the filtering.
  - anonAndOn 5y ago
    DNS filtering (pi-hole is great here), scheduled vLAN time of use shutoffs (no after school shenanigans), obvious blacklists and ip request logging + pop-up warning are probably good enough for 95% of kids.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      We use Meraki (huge wireless deployment, so it makes a lot of sense to just use their gateway and call it good) with their blacklists. Biggest problem is it considers too many things "gaming" and needs exceptions-- e.g. lichess and chess.com are OK. Authentication and logging are pretty good. Rateshaping students to have enough bandwidth to do schoolwork but not to have wonderful connectivity (campus has a 2gbps symmetric connection, but we only give students 4-5 megabits/sec over wifi most places on campus) is also a part of the picture.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Whitelists. It's kind of a pain, but might help reign in the teachers that send kids everywhere on the internet without much thought about the surveillance dangers.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        MS and HS students are expected to be able to independently browse the internet to do research-- this doesn't work with whitelisting. (And in elementary, there's good human supervision of technology use).
        oriki 5y ago
        This, not to mention it seems somewhat unproductive to lock off 99% of the internet because of information collection instead of teaching how to defeat those collectors. The kid's going to grow up and leave eventually and will have to contend with the full internet, it doesn't feel like a good idea to leave them without any experience of the kind of things you can run in to.
        mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Kids don't get any "experience" contending with surveillance. It is all done behind your back, on purpose. Results are never deleted. Certainly schools are not even attempting to teach countermeasures. They tend to dabble in the "be aware of bullying and self-esteem" issues, but are completely outmatched in the security arena. Ignore at your peril.
  - Damogran6 5y ago
    You're obligated to block, because you're responsible for giving it to them and you have to deal with the population as a whole. I based my decisions on my kid's temperament. You don't have that luxury. It doesn't mean you'll be in any way effective. By the same token, we block this kind of traffic at work...all it ended up doing was pushing the negative traffic to employee's cellphones. Which is fine, because it makes the office network safer.
kiryin 5y ago
This is the right way to go. Teach, don't block. You fuck up your relationship to your kids if you force them to keep secrets from you and constantly "fight" against you. Because trust me, that's how it'll end up.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  It doesn't. I have a whitelisting transparent proxy for my primary school-age kids. It's not controversial and they don't attempt to get round it or rail against it. If they want something they ask. If I say no (and explain why) they accept it. They're interested in internet safety and we discuss it frequently. Teaching vs blocking is a false dichotomy. As they get older I'll remove it in stages: blacklist, logging only, then direct access with no proxy. The opening up will be done when it seems appropriate and in full discussion with them. I don't have a schedule for it. When they're old enough to have phones I can initially give them managed devices with always-on wireguard and the same transparent proxy. (I've tested this setup and it's not circumventible without wiping the device.) The claims often made on hn about this stuff, that: * Kids will resent any attempt to limit their access, and * Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access. are empirically false, at least in my experience so far. I expect they become more true in the teenage years but that's when things can start to open up. Even if the restrictions have to be entirely dropped or become irrelevant the second they enter senior school, they've already benefited a lot from this over the years. The other argument, that other kids will have phones etc so there's no point, is just an abdication of responsibility. I feel like I should do my best here, whatever everyone else is doing. The one thing that is true is that it's quite technically demanding. A managed phone with an always-on wireguard connection to a network with a transparent ssl-bump mitm proxy and a domain-based whitelist with an admin UI to browse logs and block/unblock domains is not an easy thing to set up. It's possible, though, and it has value. It should be much easier.
  - Macha 5y ago
    > * Kids will resent any attempt to limit their access, and > * Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access. There's plenty of people in their mid-20s now on HN who have been the kids, either working around their parents restrictions or their friends parents restrictions. I had an internet enabled phone as a 12 year old in 2004, so it's not a post-iPhone kid experience only. And yes, parental control software has got smarter to not just be a matter of changing your DNS or using an alternative browser, but tunneling over SSH still defeats much of it, and yes the audience here is more tech savvy, but there's a hundred new web based proxies that open up every day that your chosen solution may not be up to date on blocking - whitelists avoid that but it's something a lot of people here are opposed to on moral grounds once kids reach a certain age. Certainly if you let them go out unsupervised that's not enforcable, and honestly you should be able to let a 12 year old go out unsupervised.
fatnoah 5y ago
>I figured, when my kids were a certain age, that if I took that route, they'd ALWAYS get around whatever control I put in front of them My son is 14, and when my wife proposed blocks and access control, I made this very point. Even if we were able to perfectly lock down our home and his phone, we can't control every other place he can access the Internet. So, we also are in a talk about it, occasionally check on what he's been into, talk about anything "interesting" that comes up, but NEVER make a big deal of if. As long as we're able to discuss it (and no, he doesn't love talking about it), I'm OK. By keeping it low stress and low key, there's no incentive for him to hide.
- jupp0r 5y ago
  You should still do some blocking to make sure he learns how to circumvent them. Those are valuable skills to have later in life, I still profit from the lessons I learned circumventing high school internet restrictions.
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    Through Norton's suite I had filtered out YouTube app from being installed. It took ~10 minutes for my 5 yo to figure out use it via Safari :-| Since then it's been education over enforcement as OPs have mentioned.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      Does the Norton suite not have website/URLbase filtering? Weak sauce.
  - Damogran6 5y ago
    My kids learned all about that in schools...by the teachers...so they could bypass the blocks to see youtube videos for class!
  - fatnoah 5y ago
    I'm confident he already has those skills. When he was in fourth grade, my wife and I were called into a meeting with the (private) school Principal because my son had "hacked all of the tablets used for class so kids could play games on them." As it turns out, he merely figured out that flipping the Wi-Fi Off switch killed the network connection on the chrome-based tablets, which makes it easy to get to the chrome dino jumping game. I was disappointed that he disrupted class, but equally impressed by his resourcefulness.
ec109685 5y ago
I don't understand why it's healthy to provide one click access to the hardest core pornography to a 12 year old. Putting some restrictions in place are better than nothing in my book.
- dolni 5y ago
  Because when you are an adult, your choices have real consequences. Kids have to learn that lesson. All told, a 12 year old kid seeing porn they sought out is small potatoes compared to the consequences of some other decisions.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Porn isn’t harmless. Source: maladjusted, mid thirties virgin, who grew up with on instant and infinite access to online porn
jacurtis 5y ago
As someone who grew up in an extremely religious (arguably "cult-ish") home. I can tell you that your approach to parenting leads to healthier children (at least mentally). Hiding children from facts of life (sex, death, drugs, abuse, alcohol, etc) does not in fact help them, it helps you (the parent). It makes parents feel good, but leaves children scarred and unprepared for when they will inevitably face those facts later in life. There are stages of life when children will (or should be) exposed to those things. The brain naturally regulates these things. If a child is exposed at the proper time, their brain regulates the amount of information they are capable of understanding. As they re-experience the same thing later in life, they will understand more and their progress towards understanding that concept is more gradual and healthy. By contrast, if you shelter a kid, they will still inevitably face reality later in life, but the experience will be more difficult because they have to face everything at once. Parents should not be afraid to discuss or even introduce difficult concepts to children. The children will inevitably face these. It is better for them to face them in a controlled manner early in life so they can build healthier relationships with these hard ideas. It also gives parents better control over the introduction of these ideas. If you turn sex, alcohol, and drugs into a taboo in your house, you might think you are helping your children, but the reality is that you are actually setting them at higher risk to abuse these things later in life. Back to the original comment. If your kids are going through all this effort to subvert your DNS and controls in order to see something on the internet. It would be better to allow the child to confront their curiosity in a controlled way. Their curiosity is clearly very strong if they are willing to go to this extreme to satisfy it. Letting the curiosity pent up, will ultimately have the reverse effect than you desire. It could lead to overindulgence of that curiosity, or potentially abuse of that curiosity later in life.
- novok 5y ago
  I think there are good cases to be made about pre-puberty vs post-puberty controls. Strong fences for the 4-8 age group is pretty different than than 9-11, 12-14 or 15+
- supernovae 5y ago
  Oh believe me, NextDNS isn't because i'm trying to keep my kids safe from sex, death, drugs and alcohol, it's because the world is out to harm 13 year old girls and I want them to be protected. They watch horror movies and we've never been ashamed of nudity and sex is nothing to be ashamed of. Ironically, its not porn, warez, hacking or any of that crap that concerns me - it's the dudes who pray on girls - it's the people with fake disorders building communities to cause people to have ticks and self diagnose with severe disorders. It's kids who don't sleep because they're addicted to tik tok and instagram. Take away their phone to help break that addiction and they end up with friends phones or connecting on other devices... I can't police all that, I can't talk my kids out of that and I certainly won't hide them from the internet - but i can block the URLS of places i know that shouldn't exist and i can set sane restrictions as any good parent should Of course kids are gonna find porn and yeah, they're going to try and bypass controls. Clearly, they're figuring it out and clearly, they think we don't know so whose the clever one now? Still think Apple should have MDM for families. When i was a kid we were stealing pornos from Circle K so it's not about that at all.

_fat_santa 5y ago

When I think back to when I was a kid, getting around school internet filters and helping my friends remove parental controls from their devices, I can't help but think the Streisand Effect was hard at work in my brain. The adults was determined that I wouldn't see a thing so I was determined to see it because what could they be hiding? Now approaching the age where the thought of having a family and kids is on my mind more and more, I always wonder how I will approach this problem. I can't think I would do it any differently than you. For young children sure, throw up DNS filtering at the router level and the kiddos' will be none the wiser. But if my future kid ever turns out like me, that will probably only work until 7 or 8 (when I figured out how routers worked), at that point I would think it has to be an honest conversation about all the crap on the internet. Even when I was a kid I knew when the adults were feeding me a load of crap.

mlyle 5y ago
What do you think schools should do? I teach at a school (K-12), and there's definitely circumvention of technical controls at the high school level. But I can't help but think we're a whole better off because of the filtering.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  DNS filtering (pi-hole is great here), scheduled vLAN time of use shutoffs (no after school shenanigans), obvious blacklists and ip request logging + pop-up warning are probably good enough for 95% of kids.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    We use Meraki (huge wireless deployment, so it makes a lot of sense to just use their gateway and call it good) with their blacklists. Biggest problem is it considers too many things "gaming" and needs exceptions-- e.g. lichess and chess.com are OK. Authentication and logging are pretty good. Rateshaping students to have enough bandwidth to do schoolwork but not to have wonderful connectivity (campus has a 2gbps symmetric connection, but we only give students 4-5 megabits/sec over wifi most places on campus) is also a part of the picture.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Whitelists. It's kind of a pain, but might help reign in the teachers that send kids everywhere on the internet without much thought about the surveillance dangers.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      MS and HS students are expected to be able to independently browse the internet to do research-- this doesn't work with whitelisting. (And in elementary, there's good human supervision of technology use).
      - oriki 5y ago
        This, not to mention it seems somewhat unproductive to lock off 99% of the internet because of information collection instead of teaching how to defeat those collectors. The kid's going to grow up and leave eventually and will have to contend with the full internet, it doesn't feel like a good idea to leave them without any experience of the kind of things you can run in to.
        mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Kids don't get any "experience" contending with surveillance. It is all done behind your back, on purpose. Results are never deleted. Certainly schools are not even attempting to teach countermeasures. They tend to dabble in the "be aware of bullying and self-esteem" issues, but are completely outmatched in the security arena. Ignore at your peril.
- Damogran6 5y ago
  You're obligated to block, because you're responsible for giving it to them and you have to deal with the population as a whole. I based my decisions on my kid's temperament. You don't have that luxury. It doesn't mean you'll be in any way effective. By the same token, we block this kind of traffic at work...all it ended up doing was pushing the negative traffic to employee's cellphones. Which is fine, because it makes the office network safer.

kiryin 5y ago

This is the right way to go. Teach, don't block. You fuck up your relationship to your kids if you force them to keep secrets from you and constantly "fight" against you. Because trust me, that's how it'll end up.

omnicognate 5y ago
It doesn't. I have a whitelisting transparent proxy for my primary school-age kids. It's not controversial and they don't attempt to get round it or rail against it. If they want something they ask. If I say no (and explain why) they accept it. They're interested in internet safety and we discuss it frequently. Teaching vs blocking is a false dichotomy. As they get older I'll remove it in stages: blacklist, logging only, then direct access with no proxy. The opening up will be done when it seems appropriate and in full discussion with them. I don't have a schedule for it. When they're old enough to have phones I can initially give them managed devices with always-on wireguard and the same transparent proxy. (I've tested this setup and it's not circumventible without wiping the device.) The claims often made on hn about this stuff, that: * Kids will resent any attempt to limit their access, and * Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access. are empirically false, at least in my experience so far. I expect they become more true in the teenage years but that's when things can start to open up. Even if the restrictions have to be entirely dropped or become irrelevant the second they enter senior school, they've already benefited a lot from this over the years. The other argument, that other kids will have phones etc so there's no point, is just an abdication of responsibility. I feel like I should do my best here, whatever everyone else is doing. The one thing that is true is that it's quite technically demanding. A managed phone with an always-on wireguard connection to a network with a transparent ssl-bump mitm proxy and a domain-based whitelist with an admin UI to browse logs and block/unblock domains is not an easy thing to set up. It's possible, though, and it has value. It should be much easier.
- Macha 5y ago
  > * Kids will resent any attempt to limit their access, and > * Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access. There's plenty of people in their mid-20s now on HN who have been the kids, either working around their parents restrictions or their friends parents restrictions. I had an internet enabled phone as a 12 year old in 2004, so it's not a post-iPhone kid experience only. And yes, parental control software has got smarter to not just be a matter of changing your DNS or using an alternative browser, but tunneling over SSH still defeats much of it, and yes the audience here is more tech savvy, but there's a hundred new web based proxies that open up every day that your chosen solution may not be up to date on blocking - whitelists avoid that but it's something a lot of people here are opposed to on moral grounds once kids reach a certain age. Certainly if you let them go out unsupervised that's not enforcable, and honestly you should be able to let a 12 year old go out unsupervised.

fatnoah 5y ago

>I figured, when my kids were a certain age, that if I took that route, they'd ALWAYS get around whatever control I put in front of them My son is 14, and when my wife proposed blocks and access control, I made this very point. Even if we were able to perfectly lock down our home and his phone, we can't control every other place he can access the Internet. So, we also are in a talk about it, occasionally check on what he's been into, talk about anything "interesting" that comes up, but NEVER make a big deal of if. As long as we're able to discuss it (and no, he doesn't love talking about it), I'm OK. By keeping it low stress and low key, there's no incentive for him to hide.

jupp0r 5y ago
You should still do some blocking to make sure he learns how to circumvent them. Those are valuable skills to have later in life, I still profit from the lessons I learned circumventing high school internet restrictions.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  Through Norton's suite I had filtered out YouTube app from being installed. It took ~10 minutes for my 5 yo to figure out use it via Safari :-| Since then it's been education over enforcement as OPs have mentioned.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Does the Norton suite not have website/URLbase filtering? Weak sauce.
- Damogran6 5y ago
  My kids learned all about that in schools...by the teachers...so they could bypass the blocks to see youtube videos for class!
- fatnoah 5y ago
  I'm confident he already has those skills. When he was in fourth grade, my wife and I were called into a meeting with the (private) school Principal because my son had "hacked all of the tablets used for class so kids could play games on them." As it turns out, he merely figured out that flipping the Wi-Fi Off switch killed the network connection on the chrome-based tablets, which makes it easy to get to the chrome dino jumping game. I was disappointed that he disrupted class, but equally impressed by his resourcefulness.

ec109685 5y ago

I don't understand why it's healthy to provide one click access to the hardest core pornography to a 12 year old. Putting some restrictions in place are better than nothing in my book.

dolni 5y ago
Because when you are an adult, your choices have real consequences. Kids have to learn that lesson. All told, a 12 year old kid seeing porn they sought out is small potatoes compared to the consequences of some other decisions.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Porn isn’t harmless. Source: maladjusted, mid thirties virgin, who grew up with on instant and infinite access to online porn

jacurtis 5y ago

As someone who grew up in an extremely religious (arguably "cult-ish") home. I can tell you that your approach to parenting leads to healthier children (at least mentally). Hiding children from facts of life (sex, death, drugs, abuse, alcohol, etc) does not in fact help them, it helps you (the parent). It makes parents feel good, but leaves children scarred and unprepared for when they will inevitably face those facts later in life. There are stages of life when children will (or should be) exposed to those things. The brain naturally regulates these things. If a child is exposed at the proper time, their brain regulates the amount of information they are capable of understanding. As they re-experience the same thing later in life, they will understand more and their progress towards understanding that concept is more gradual and healthy. By contrast, if you shelter a kid, they will still inevitably face reality later in life, but the experience will be more difficult because they have to face everything at once. Parents should not be afraid to discuss or even introduce difficult concepts to children. The children will inevitably face these. It is better for them to face them in a controlled manner early in life so they can build healthier relationships with these hard ideas. It also gives parents better control over the introduction of these ideas. If you turn sex, alcohol, and drugs into a taboo in your house, you might think you are helping your children, but the reality is that you are actually setting them at higher risk to abuse these things later in life. Back to the original comment. If your kids are going through all this effort to subvert your DNS and controls in order to see something on the internet. It would be better to allow the child to confront their curiosity in a controlled way. Their curiosity is clearly very strong if they are willing to go to this extreme to satisfy it. Letting the curiosity pent up, will ultimately have the reverse effect than you desire. It could lead to overindulgence of that curiosity, or potentially abuse of that curiosity later in life.

novok 5y ago
I think there are good cases to be made about pre-puberty vs post-puberty controls. Strong fences for the 4-8 age group is pretty different than than 9-11, 12-14 or 15+
supernovae 5y ago
Oh believe me, NextDNS isn't because i'm trying to keep my kids safe from sex, death, drugs and alcohol, it's because the world is out to harm 13 year old girls and I want them to be protected. They watch horror movies and we've never been ashamed of nudity and sex is nothing to be ashamed of. Ironically, its not porn, warez, hacking or any of that crap that concerns me - it's the dudes who pray on girls - it's the people with fake disorders building communities to cause people to have ticks and self diagnose with severe disorders. It's kids who don't sleep because they're addicted to tik tok and instagram. Take away their phone to help break that addiction and they end up with friends phones or connecting on other devices... I can't police all that, I can't talk my kids out of that and I certainly won't hide them from the internet - but i can block the URLS of places i know that shouldn't exist and i can set sane restrictions as any good parent should Of course kids are gonna find porn and yeah, they're going to try and bypass controls. Clearly, they're figuring it out and clearly, they think we don't know so whose the clever one now? Still think Apple should have MDM for families. When i was a kid we were stealing pornos from Circle K so it's not about that at all.