On Tuesday 15 May 2007 10:56:26 pm Gary Thornock wrote:
> I also depend primarily on DansGuardian on BSD for my content
> filtering, and I agree that it's not something that most parents
> can set up.
I can, and did, but turned it off. We've decided to handle the issue a
different way, with the kids' computer placed in the kitchen/dining room
where little privacy is available, plus discussion of the issues and
occasional review of the kids' browsing habits.
There are two sides to the filtering question, IMO. On the one hand, we all
know that once you see something, that image will stick with you, so parents
can help their children by ensuring they never see porn. On the other hand,
kids are frequently out of our homes and our control and if they want to see
porn, there are lots of places they can do it, so what we really want to do
is to teach them not to want to look at it. That's much harder than blocking
it, but much more valuable as well.
This is a difficult question and there's no solid right or wrong answer, but
my wife and I have put a lot of thought into it (prompted by discovering that
one of our children had looked at porn, at age 8) and we've decided to focus
on accountability and education, rather than blocking.
One (OSS!) tool that I have found very helpful in encouraging accountability
is timeoutd. It runs on Linux and probably other Unixes, and allows the
administrator to specify various time limits on computer usage, by login
account. The main purpose is to limit the amount of time the kids spend
playing on the computer to a reasonable level, but a nice side effect is that
it discourages account sharing. After I implemented timeoutd, the kids no
longer share their passwords. When you combine that with per-account web
browser histories, it gives me a pretty good way to determine who is looking
at what stuff on-line.
Of course, the most important part of this approach to handling the Internet
problem is lots of discussion of the issues and the temporal and eternal
benefits of obedience. The pupose of being able to review browsing history
is just so that we know if/when our approach is failing.
My $0.02
Shawn.
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