James Carroll wrote: > Since one of the major things I teach in my LDS security class is that you > most definitely should be running some form of monitoring to avoid > pornography use on your computers by your family or their guests in your > home, here I must disagree, and do so relatively strongly.
I support filtering and blocking internet access in the home (or anywhere really). But blocking and filtering is very different from the "monitoring" that you are proposing, at least as I understand your terms. Also none of this debate really applies to BYU reading e-mail as this is talking about a person accessing information, rather than person-to-person communication that is not desired to be public. If I happen to catch a guest or child viewing inappropriate material as I walk past the computer, I do have a right to request that such material not be accessed in my home, take away computer privileges, etc. But to actively monitor each url as it flies across my network and note the bad ones, while not actually blocking them, isn't appropriate in my opinion. At least unless you've explained to the kids exactly what is going on, why, and get their consent. I hope you can see the difference here and why one might be a better approach with families and children than the other, for example. Monitoring simply tells you when there are bodies at the bottom of the cliff. Filtering and blocking can be a fence at the top of the cliff. Of course a this belies the fact that kids getting into inappropriate stuff isn't the actual core problem but a symptom that a lot of other things have gone wrong, including a breakdown of trust between parents and children, self-esteem issues, and often parents unwillingness to talk about the core issues. This is moving very far afield from Andrew's original issue though. > Thus, your position would invalidate one of the first major suggestions of > my security class. I didn't come up with this either. Using known monitoring > is one of the first recommendations of most pornography addiction recovery > and prevention services. People are far less likely to slip when they KNOW > that people are watching what they do. The point isn't to "catch" someone > but to deter them from doing it in the first place. If someone is trying to overcome such a habit, then consensual monitoring is appropriate. But the key word here is "consensual." It's an agency thing. While on the topic of "filtering," I have yet to find any real good solution for families. None of the "known monitoring" solutions work that well. DansGuardian is one of the best I've found so far, running it in a transparent way on Windows or even Mac is a problem (I can crash every OS X 10.5 machine in about 25 minutes by using ifw to redirect outbound port 80 traffic to the proxy). -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
