The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>I'm wondering whether the idea of real parental controls can ever be put into place on the Internet...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>uhm...is this just a random thought of yours...or did you just forget to include a link?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>No.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Are you kidding? They can barely stop a pop-up let alone put those types of controls on the net.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>See AOL</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>I was going to relate my adventures bypassing both NetNanny and AOL in minutes, but figured on the off chance kids come here I didn't want to give them any ideas.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>I got past AOL's parental controls in actually literally about twenty seconds with my little brother.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>There is no way to filter every "bad" site on the net, especially without killing a bunch of good ones. Even if you throw the baby out with the bath water, you'll still be missing a bunch of bad sites. The EFF (among others) had a Supreme Court battle about this in reference to the law that denied federal funding to libraries, unless they installed filters. A lesbian wanted to find out information about her sexuality, but was denied because of the filters. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor, saying that these filters were indeed crappy, and struck down the third attempt Congress has made at "child proofing" the Internet in library computers.

So, if the Supreme Court says they are crappy, then they are crappy. The best option is a transparent proxy on a seperate machine. And don't filter the domains. Just have the proxy flag them and silently warn you (via e-mail) if they are hit. In this way, you can confront the individual about the domains later, and there's nothing that shows which domains the proxy might miss.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Why not? I'm sure there's plenty of (unfiltered) sites on the subject.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>Well, NetNanny can be undone with System Restore, and for AOL just run iexplore from the Start menu. This worked even when my father had supposedly deleted iexplore.exe from the computer, I guess it's really built into Windows now or something.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>The question being that why should a kid have access to System Restore. If you want real security, you'll need to lock down the administrator account. (Actually, if you want to have real security, you'll need to unplug all connections and lock the PC in a safe box.)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>If the parent is competent, he/she can remove the Run command from the start menu on the kid's account, take off access to System Restore and lock it down like you said. However, the problem is that many kids are a lot more tech savvy than their parents...</div>

<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>Also I would be willing to bet that 90% of home computers still have the same security config that came with the box (in other words, full access to everyone for everything.) At least, I've not seen anything different in the households with young children I've seen so far.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Of course. Like I said earlier, it's impossible to completely lockdown a computer, but trying to impose the minimal amount of work is going to get you the minimal amount of effort to defeat it.</div>