10 ms·

Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?

honkycat 3y ago
Why do we need a policy? Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters?
- mattpallissard 3y ago
  > Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters? Not a comment on the policy; I'm a parent and AFAICT none of my cohorts in town know how to do this.
  - Osiris 3y ago
    My son runs a vpn to get around my dns enforced fillers. I’ve tried to block vpns but he still finds a way.
    - gambiting 3y ago
      I don't understand - if I did this kind of thing as a kid I'd just lose progressively more and more privileges. My parents never put technical obstacles in my way - there were just clear consequences for braking the rules. If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? No?
      - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        tldr: if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that for the same reasons that punitive punishment in the judicial system is not effective. Your kid has to understand why the rules are if they're ever going to function well within them, and that also requires a level of parental compassion and understanding that often isn't present. > If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight. Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt. My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering. I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock. Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset. There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members. Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed. As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
        raisedbyninjas 3y ago
        I support the education driven approach, but I still think there is room for content filtering. In the next few years, I hope turning on suite of content rules across platforms will mitigate explicit material from automatically being included in normal content feeds and prevent casual searches for porn. I have no expectations that blocking material from enterprising children will be effective and consider it a more of a parenting strategy failure anyway.
        tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        Yeah, I think there's absolutely value in controlling the pressures and expectations that kids are under--e.g., filtering sexually suggestive stuff out of social media feeds, etc. (Also for violence, too. I know seeing stuff like combat footage out of Ukraine is doing weird things to my psyche, I can't imagine what it'd be doing to a still-developing-brain.) I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through. Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
        freedomben 3y ago
        Exactly. I use content controls even though as a kid I easily worked around them. The reason is that it is insanely easy for kid to accidentally stumble upon explicit stuff. The content controls help a lot with that, whether kid is 5 or 15
        mattpallissard 3y ago
        > if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that I can't speak for all children, but I have five of them and this works pretty damned well in most circumstances.
    - luoc 3y ago
      That's great and how many hacker careers have started!
      - monetus 3y ago
        My thoughts echo yours; it might be frustrating but they should maybe be a little proud.
    - pmichaud 3y ago
      I feel like if you’re involved in a red queen race of VPNs and filtering, your kid is probably old enough to see whatever they are trying to see?
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Interesting dichotomy among the sibling comments. One is about removing privileges, the other is about (ostensibly) empowering a smart kid to continue learning how to hack and eventually possibly make a career out of it.
    - millzlane 3y ago
      You don't block the VPN, you take away his admin access.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        Your overconfidence just got you hacked by your son because taking away the admin access did nothing. The kid just installed a scummy Chrome plugin that gives him a "free" VPN (I say "free" because it's surely logging everything he does) and it works directly from chrome. no admin needed. Source: my son did this to me
    - someNameIG 3y ago
      A VPN would get around age verification filters too, the kid would just set the VPN server to a jurisdiction that doesn't require age verification.
    - jupp0r 3y ago
      Getting around network restrictions started my software engineering career. You had to learn all about TCP/IP, transparent proxies, SSH tunnels, DNS, Linux boxes, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, John The Ripper, write Perl scripts, cron jobs, CGI, how automate things and become the ghost in the machine. Best educational tool ever for kids.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Yes education on content filters is absurdly low despite how crucial they are for general use. There are so many layers of filters that exist today (and almost every major player has their own family filter app/system), but outside of the ones that are forced before use, many have absolutely no idea they exist. It gets tucked away in a settings menu somewhere under your account menu basically. Or like on iOS where you have to also go into screen time to set filters, it can be confusing! This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. Apparently some policy is needed to allow content filters to work in the first place, especially as everything is using TLS these days and it's being made increasingly difficult to install root certificates to do MITM filtering (not that it was ever easy). I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed. A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
  - cmh89 3y ago
    > posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html It's called being a parent
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult. It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
sophacles 3y ago
How about: If you don't want your kids to see it, that's on you. Either accept that you are a shitty parent who can't raise children to your satisfaction, or get better at parenting. Don't force consequences on me just because you are incompetent.
- Brendinooo 3y ago
  We don't apply this principle to something like peanut allergies. "If your kid touches a peanut, that's on you as a parent"? No, people recognized that peanuts are harmful enough to a certain segment of the population that it's worth making changes, even changes that might inconvenience others. Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
  - scarface74 3y ago
    Yes and forcing people to show ID has really stopped underaged drinking and making drugs illegal have stopped people from smoking weed.
    - Brendinooo 3y ago
      There's plenty of room between "unrestricted" and "stopped". You're not arguing that "laws don't actually do anything", right?
    - George83728 3y ago
      Laws against murder haven't stopped murder, so I guess those laws are useless. Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
      - monetus 3y ago
        This doesn't directly add to or take from your point, because obviously laws have a purpose - that assassin was motivated by an extreme religious affiliation to the lawmakers. There is irony here.
dragonwriter 3y ago
The concept of “minors” involves arbitrary rules, so, no. That isn’t, however, an argument against restraint in such arbitrariness, but the opposite.

honkycat 3y ago

Why do we need a policy? Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters?

mattpallissard 3y ago
> Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters? Not a comment on the policy; I'm a parent and AFAICT none of my cohorts in town know how to do this.
- Osiris 3y ago
  My son runs a vpn to get around my dns enforced fillers. I’ve tried to block vpns but he still finds a way.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    I don't understand - if I did this kind of thing as a kid I'd just lose progressively more and more privileges. My parents never put technical obstacles in my way - there were just clear consequences for braking the rules. If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? No?
    - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
      tldr: if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that for the same reasons that punitive punishment in the judicial system is not effective. Your kid has to understand why the rules are if they're ever going to function well within them, and that also requires a level of parental compassion and understanding that often isn't present. > If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight. Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt. My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering. I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock. Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset. There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members. Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed. As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
      - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
        I support the education driven approach, but I still think there is room for content filtering. In the next few years, I hope turning on suite of content rules across platforms will mitigate explicit material from automatically being included in normal content feeds and prevent casual searches for porn. I have no expectations that blocking material from enterprising children will be effective and consider it a more of a parenting strategy failure anyway.
        tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        Yeah, I think there's absolutely value in controlling the pressures and expectations that kids are under--e.g., filtering sexually suggestive stuff out of social media feeds, etc. (Also for violence, too. I know seeing stuff like combat footage out of Ukraine is doing weird things to my psyche, I can't imagine what it'd be doing to a still-developing-brain.) I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through. Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
        freedomben 3y ago
        Exactly. I use content controls even though as a kid I easily worked around them. The reason is that it is insanely easy for kid to accidentally stumble upon explicit stuff. The content controls help a lot with that, whether kid is 5 or 15
      - mattpallissard 3y ago
        > if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that I can't speak for all children, but I have five of them and this works pretty damned well in most circumstances.
  - luoc 3y ago
    That's great and how many hacker careers have started!
    - monetus 3y ago
      My thoughts echo yours; it might be frustrating but they should maybe be a little proud.
  - pmichaud 3y ago
    I feel like if you’re involved in a red queen race of VPNs and filtering, your kid is probably old enough to see whatever they are trying to see?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Interesting dichotomy among the sibling comments. One is about removing privileges, the other is about (ostensibly) empowering a smart kid to continue learning how to hack and eventually possibly make a career out of it.
  - millzlane 3y ago
    You don't block the VPN, you take away his admin access.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Your overconfidence just got you hacked by your son because taking away the admin access did nothing. The kid just installed a scummy Chrome plugin that gives him a "free" VPN (I say "free" because it's surely logging everything he does) and it works directly from chrome. no admin needed. Source: my son did this to me
  - someNameIG 3y ago
    A VPN would get around age verification filters too, the kid would just set the VPN server to a jurisdiction that doesn't require age verification.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    Getting around network restrictions started my software engineering career. You had to learn all about TCP/IP, transparent proxies, SSH tunnels, DNS, Linux boxes, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, John The Ripper, write Perl scripts, cron jobs, CGI, how automate things and become the ghost in the machine. Best educational tool ever for kids.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Yes education on content filters is absurdly low despite how crucial they are for general use. There are so many layers of filters that exist today (and almost every major player has their own family filter app/system), but outside of the ones that are forced before use, many have absolutely no idea they exist. It gets tucked away in a settings menu somewhere under your account menu basically. Or like on iOS where you have to also go into screen time to set filters, it can be confusing! This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ndriscoll 3y ago
I posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. Apparently some policy is needed to allow content filters to work in the first place, especially as everything is using TLS these days and it's being made increasingly difficult to install root certificates to do MITM filtering (not that it was ever easy). I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed. A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
- cmh89 3y ago
  > posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html It's called being a parent
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult. It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.

sophacles 3y ago

How about: If you don't want your kids to see it, that's on you. Either accept that you are a shitty parent who can't raise children to your satisfaction, or get better at parenting. Don't force consequences on me just because you are incompetent.

Brendinooo 3y ago
We don't apply this principle to something like peanut allergies. "If your kid touches a peanut, that's on you as a parent"? No, people recognized that peanuts are harmful enough to a certain segment of the population that it's worth making changes, even changes that might inconvenience others. Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
- scarface74 3y ago
  Yes and forcing people to show ID has really stopped underaged drinking and making drugs illegal have stopped people from smoking weed.
  - Brendinooo 3y ago
    There's plenty of room between "unrestricted" and "stopped". You're not arguing that "laws don't actually do anything", right?
  - George83728 3y ago
    Laws against murder haven't stopped murder, so I guess those laws are useless. Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
    - monetus 3y ago
      This doesn't directly add to or take from your point, because obviously laws have a purpose - that assassin was motivated by an extreme religious affiliation to the lawmakers. There is irony here.

dragonwriter 3y ago

The concept of “minors” involves arbitrary rules, so, no. That isn’t, however, an argument against restraint in such arbitrariness, but the opposite.