5 ms·

ISPs and OSs should be the ones providing these tools and make is stupid easy to set up a child's account and have a walled garden for kids to use.

blindriver 7mo ago
You must not have kids if you think it's easy to keep children off things that are bad for them.
- squigz 7mo ago
  It's really not some Herculean task to do so either, though.
  - metadat 7mo ago
    Maybe you don't have kids of your own. Once you have 2 or 3, it is quite challenging to manage everything, especially over time.
    - blindriver 7mo ago
      Especially if they are older, like 8+ years old. They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless.
      - aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
        > They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless. ... and honest: - they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement) - they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them) - they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing - ...
        squigz 7mo ago
        Sounds like a kid in need of psychiatric help.
        aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
        You barely ever had to deal with pubescent children? :-)
        squigz 7mo ago
        I mean, that's really not normal puberty stuff, but... okay.
        hunterpayne 7mo ago
        I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result. And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
        bryan_w 7mo ago
        Please get the kids some help before we have to send you thoughts and prayers
      - cgriswald 7mo ago
        Which is exactly why all people everywhere giving up their privacy will also be ineffective. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal for me to access as a kid but I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting any of it.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
        Maybe at 16, not at 8.
        cgriswald 7mo ago
        The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places. At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
        There’s a difference between “saw a playboy once” and having regular or semi regular access to it. Same goes for alcohol and cigarettes. If you had regular access to those things you had parents who didn’t care. It’s also not about kids on the margin. The vast majority of 8 year olds have not tried alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.
        cgriswald 7mo ago
        There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
  - Kaliboy 7mo ago
    I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time. It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
    - hellojesus 7mo ago
      Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
  - scottLobster 7mo ago
    As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it. We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments. Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback. Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer. And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs? Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
    - Wobbles42 7mo ago
      I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before. Thank you for that.
      - scottLobster 7mo ago
        Well it's all more than worth it, at least for us. But that doesn't make some of the excess judgement tedious to deal with. Kids are great at forcing you to prioritize. All of a sudden pre-ground coffee is worth it.
- friendzis 7mo ago
  [Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach. Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    Dumb question, not a parent — how old does a child have to be before they'll only touch the hot thing once so you don't need to guard it?
    - nout 7mo ago
      They learn to not intentionally touch the hot thing between 1 to 2 years, but then they still can fall on it or hit it during play. As a parent you quickly learn that when you don't actively prevent major accidents it ends up costing you much more time, stress, screaming, etc.
maccard 7mo ago
I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level. A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer. The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.
- drnick1 7mo ago
  No, it's about corporate and government control. Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech, which means these controls can be bypassed relatively easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like Quad9.
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.
- whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
  You have to be very tech savvy to know that your kid asking to install Discord to talk to/play games with their friend group is as dangerous as it is.
  - maccard 7mo ago
    A single google search will tell you pretty unanimously that discord isn’t for kids, is rated 13+ and has risks of talking to strangers.
    - Gigachad 7mo ago
      Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.
techblueberry 7mo ago
Mark Zuckerberg advocates for this, most people entrenched in this argument think it's worse. But I'm all for burning it to the ground so.
MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
There's a law going through in some state that want's to do this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It would kill the open computer and kill ownership over computing.
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago
  Why would it be a problem to do this sort of thing with linux? Linux allows for oauth, proxied networking, what have you -- unless they're using some super-secret-unpublished-protocol, linux will be fine I'm against these age-verification laws, but to say it's impossible to comply with open-source software isn't really true.
  - tsimionescu 7mo ago
    The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.
    - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
      Or, Conversely, these systems won't be able to verify age and will just be shut out of adult content. Which is fine, just keep a windows machine around for porn and do your actual work on a real computer
      - MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
        > Which is fine But it isn't fine. How long before that's no longer an option? A few years ago it was "Apple won't let me side load apps, which is fine, I'll run android" now that's coming back and getting locked down even more. How long before normal computers will all have signed bootloaders with only the OEM's OS of choice allowed to boot, 4 chains deep of verifying signatures on hardware security chips?

blindriver 7mo ago

You must not have kids if you think it's easy to keep children off things that are bad for them.

squigz 7mo ago
It's really not some Herculean task to do so either, though.
- metadat 7mo ago
  Maybe you don't have kids of your own. Once you have 2 or 3, it is quite challenging to manage everything, especially over time.
  - blindriver 7mo ago
    Especially if they are older, like 8+ years old. They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless.
    - aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
      > They are resourceful, sneaky and relentless. ... and honest: - they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement) - they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them) - they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing - ...
      - squigz 7mo ago
        Sounds like a kid in need of psychiatric help.
        aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
        You barely ever had to deal with pubescent children? :-)
        squigz 7mo ago
        I mean, that's really not normal puberty stuff, but... okay.
        hunterpayne 7mo ago
        I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result. And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
        bryan_w 7mo ago
        Please get the kids some help before we have to send you thoughts and prayers
    - cgriswald 7mo ago
      Which is exactly why all people everywhere giving up their privacy will also be ineffective. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal for me to access as a kid but I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting any of it.
      - sarchertech 7mo ago
        Maybe at 16, not at 8.
        cgriswald 7mo ago
        The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places. At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
        There’s a difference between “saw a playboy once” and having regular or semi regular access to it. Same goes for alcohol and cigarettes. If you had regular access to those things you had parents who didn’t care. It’s also not about kids on the margin. The vast majority of 8 year olds have not tried alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.
        cgriswald 7mo ago
        There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
        sarchertech 7mo ago
- Kaliboy 7mo ago
  I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time. It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
  - hellojesus 7mo ago
    Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
- scottLobster 7mo ago
  As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it. We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments. Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback. Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer. And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs? Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
  - Wobbles42 7mo ago
    I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before. Thank you for that.
    - scottLobster 7mo ago
      Well it's all more than worth it, at least for us. But that doesn't make some of the excess judgement tedious to deal with. Kids are great at forcing you to prioritize. All of a sudden pre-ground coffee is worth it.
friendzis 7mo ago
[Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach. Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  Dumb question, not a parent — how old does a child have to be before they'll only touch the hot thing once so you don't need to guard it?
  - nout 7mo ago
    They learn to not intentionally touch the hot thing between 1 to 2 years, but then they still can fall on it or hit it during play. As a parent you quickly learn that when you don't actively prevent major accidents it ends up costing you much more time, stress, screaming, etc.

maccard 7mo ago

I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level. A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer. The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.

drnick1 7mo ago
No, it's about corporate and government control. Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech, which means these controls can be bypassed relatively easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like Quad9.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.
whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
You have to be very tech savvy to know that your kid asking to install Discord to talk to/play games with their friend group is as dangerous as it is.
- maccard 7mo ago
  A single google search will tell you pretty unanimously that discord isn’t for kids, is rated 13+ and has risks of talking to strangers.
  - Gigachad 7mo ago
    Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.

techblueberry 7mo ago

Mark Zuckerberg advocates for this, most people entrenched in this argument think it's worse. But I'm all for burning it to the ground so.

MSFT_Edging 7mo ago

There's a law going through in some state that want's to do this, but also put the onus on the OS developers to detect age aligned behavior. How do you do this with Linux? It would kill the open computer and kill ownership over computing.

bigfishrunning 7mo ago
Why would it be a problem to do this sort of thing with linux? Linux allows for oauth, proxied networking, what have you -- unless they're using some super-secret-unpublished-protocol, linux will be fine I'm against these age-verification laws, but to say it's impossible to comply with open-source software isn't really true.
- tsimionescu 7mo ago
  The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.
  - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    Or, Conversely, these systems won't be able to verify age and will just be shut out of adult content. Which is fine, just keep a windows machine around for porn and do your actual work on a real computer
    - MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
      > Which is fine But it isn't fine. How long before that's no longer an option? A few years ago it was "Apple won't let me side load apps, which is fine, I'll run android" now that's coming back and getting locked down even more. How long before normal computers will all have signed bootloaders with only the OEM's OS of choice allowed to boot, 4 chains deep of verifying signatures on hardware security chips?