4 ms·

I expect people in 2023 to understand parental controls.

jstarfish 3y ago
We can't even successfully curtail adverse behavior in the enterprise, with budgetary spends for DLP and communications monitoring measured in the millions. Parents don't stand a chance. You could be running a fucking kiosk with only Minecraft on it. If it still has an internet connection, kids will be harassed, bullied and solicited. It's the kids who taught me about the existence and purpose of Finstagram accounts. The only effective parental control is unplugging them from the internet. But you can't do that, because our lives are inextricable from it now.
ndriscoll 3y ago
Which parental controls would, say, allow a kid to visit /r/roblox but not /r/nsfw? Best I can tell, Firefox literally does not have any parental controls built in, and they have a note that extensions to provide it are easily bypassed. It seems reasonable to me to at least start requiring sites and commercial software vendors to build a system that makes parental controls possible. And if a commercial site like reddit is going to have child focused content like a Roblox forum, then it should be easily separated from porn without requiring parents to set up a MITM proxy with complicated filtering rules. There are simple privacy and (adult) autonomy preserving ways filtering or access control could be done, but after 30 years it still seems to be an impossible task. Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't have a porn theatre in the back where an employee just asks if you're 18 and accepts any 7 year old saying yes.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  reddit is a big no no for children. its full of porn, politically charged topics, and predators. you can also use wildcards in a dns sinkhole to target keywords perhaps.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but also I don't think it's unreasonable that a site like that which also hosts children's forums is going to have parents wanting regulation. Pornhub doesn't have a part of the website for minor teenagers or Minecraft. Neopets doesn't have a porn or gore section. Even 4chan separates their SFW and NSFW boards onto different sites (though obviously even their SFW boards are not child friendly and don't pretend to be). You can't do anything at the DNS level for reddit (short of blocking it all) because it's all one site. And it uses TLS, so you'd need to MITM to do partial filtering, which is beyond the capability of most people. I assume Instagram and tiktok are similar/even harder to filter. Porn sites at least used to ask for credit cards. Now they just ask yes/no are you 18, and they have children's sections. They should really be working to clean up their act in a privacy/autonomy friendly way (e.g. through labeling and partnering with browsers) before they're forced into these kinds of laws. Or stop targeting children as a market and ban anyone that hints that they are under 18.
    - Eumenes 3y ago
      Some consumer routers may have the ability to filter URLs I think. I'm not really experienced in networking/web technologies. The reddit schema seems easy enough to understand but yeah IG/tiktok, seem impossible. Could you force a particular build of chrome that has extensions baked in for blocking sites/urls? Maybe an endpoint management tool to keep those applications in check. Something like Jamf.

We can't even successfully curtail adverse behavior in the enterprise, with budgetary spends for DLP and communications monitoring measured in the millions. Parents don't stand a chance. You could be running a fucking kiosk with only Minecraft on it. If it still has an internet connection, kids will be harassed, bullied and solicited. It's the kids who taught me about the existence and purpose of Finstagram accounts. The only effective parental control is unplugging them from the internet. But you can't do that, because our lives are inextricable from it now.

ndriscoll 3y ago

Which parental controls would, say, allow a kid to visit /r/roblox but not /r/nsfw? Best I can tell, Firefox literally does not have any parental controls built in, and they have a note that extensions to provide it are easily bypassed. It seems reasonable to me to at least start requiring sites and commercial software vendors to build a system that makes parental controls possible. And if a commercial site like reddit is going to have child focused content like a Roblox forum, then it should be easily separated from porn without requiring parents to set up a MITM proxy with complicated filtering rules. There are simple privacy and (adult) autonomy preserving ways filtering or access control could be done, but after 30 years it still seems to be an impossible task. Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't have a porn theatre in the back where an employee just asks if you're 18 and accepts any 7 year old saying yes.

Eumenes 3y ago
reddit is a big no no for children. its full of porn, politically charged topics, and predators. you can also use wildcards in a dns sinkhole to target keywords perhaps.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but also I don't think it's unreasonable that a site like that which also hosts children's forums is going to have parents wanting regulation. Pornhub doesn't have a part of the website for minor teenagers or Minecraft. Neopets doesn't have a porn or gore section. Even 4chan separates their SFW and NSFW boards onto different sites (though obviously even their SFW boards are not child friendly and don't pretend to be). You can't do anything at the DNS level for reddit (short of blocking it all) because it's all one site. And it uses TLS, so you'd need to MITM to do partial filtering, which is beyond the capability of most people. I assume Instagram and tiktok are similar/even harder to filter. Porn sites at least used to ask for credit cards. Now they just ask yes/no are you 18, and they have children's sections. They should really be working to clean up their act in a privacy/autonomy friendly way (e.g. through labeling and partnering with browsers) before they're forced into these kinds of laws. Or stop targeting children as a market and ban anyone that hints that they are under 18.
  - Eumenes 3y ago
    Some consumer routers may have the ability to filter URLs I think. I'm not really experienced in networking/web technologies. The reddit schema seems easy enough to understand but yeah IG/tiktok, seem impossible. Could you force a particular build of chrome that has extensions baked in for blocking sites/urls? Maybe an endpoint management tool to keep those applications in check. Something like Jamf.