.. to be shocked at the hardcore nature of the hits when you google porn

[ElenorRigby]

Try it, type porn into google.

I had no idea you could access porn so easily, there's tons of it and its really nasty too.

Seriously I thought you had to pay and download this stuff!

I note you ignore what I said about educating parents.

I didn't ignore it. It's obviously true. But you appear to want to educate them in half-truths, because you don't like the truth.

Network level filtering doesn't work. No-one serious takes it seriously, and its deployment is pretty much PR fluff. The people who would be blocked from accessing porn weren't accessing porn anyway, and most people will try it for a week and turn it off unless their web usage is extremely atypical. No ISP will release figures on the retention rate (ie, how long the filters stay turned on), but rumour in the industry is that it's very low. Bypassing them is trivial, anyway.

The stuff about Google filtering child porn is also PR fluff, and not one image will be blocked that is not already blocked, as Jim Gamble (Jim Gamble, right?) says. All Google have done is stopped telling the truth and instead done what you appear to want them to do, which is agree to tell fairy stories to make everyone feel better.

Is that it? That's your example?

Ignore everything I say about educating parents. Ignore everything I said about over-protecting children and communicating with them. Ignore everything I said about them gaining access at the homes of friends.

Let's just focus on the notion that everything you say is 100% accurate and correct and everyone else is an arse.

That is the way this thread is going.

So the lies you accuse us of is to say that safesearch can be locked. Which it can. That's a lie?

It can be locked, but it can be bypassed. That does not make it a lie to say it can be locked.

That all you got?

I'll leave you to it.

OK here's a question. Is there software available that will make it possible for non-techy parents to do what Friday did?

I know there is stuff you can buy that claims to protect, but if it claims to simply block 'bad stuff' it will be useless and if you have to put it on each PC it could be turned off or worked around I should think.

Friday when you said "at the edge of my home network" did you mean using a dedicated PC as a gateway to the internet with all access going through it? That might be beyond most people.

I don't like the truth?

What you mean the truth that actually, most protection measures can be bypassed and that if a child really wanted to look at porn, they can do.

They don't have to bypass your Fort Knox by the way, they just go to their friend's house.

I am fully aware of the truth thanks. You must be the truth-god though, with one huge ego to match.

backonlybriefly I hate to say this but your kids can and will get access to porn by going to their friends.

Talk to them about the dangers instead. But don't bother telling parents about any useless preventative measures. Unless you have advanced tech knowledge all your measures are useless so you might as well just give up and let them have access to everything. If you try to help non-techy parents you'd only be spreading lies.

I don't respond to goading. If you lower yourself to goading then your arguments mean nothing.

Ah. Comprehension issues AND chippiness. A dangerous combination.

For what it's worth bruxeur has been around a while. I remember posts from way back.

did you mean using a dedicated PC as a gateway to the internet with all access going through it?

Yes.

There was a bit more to it than that, but that's the heart of it. One machine with two interfaces, one side pointing into the house, the other side pointing to the Internet. I'd built it for work, so I built a stripped down version for home. It's not hard, but it's complicated today because most people will be using an all-in-one box which is router, network interface, wireless access point, ethernet switch and everything else. It's tricky to actually insert a device into the right place in the network. Back then there were multiple boxes involved, which made it easier.

The hardware's cheap, however: a Raspberry Pi could probably do it for forty quid unless you're wanting to run a fibre or Virgin high-speed link flat-out.

As ever with security projects, getting the policy right is much harder than doing the technology. I've considered running a business selling such solutions, but the problem is that everyone wants something subtly different, and few home users want to pay consultancy rates to get the customisation done.

You have an impressive range of techniques to avoid admitting being in the wrong! Must be practice?

Always this charming is she?

Yes, I can't read or write, I'm illiterate. There's no point in goading me, I'm too stupid to understand what you mean.

friday most parents won't know what a raspberry pi is, how do you expect parents to be able to do what you did?

Serious question: how does your average parent, with a basic grasp of the internet, protect kids like you have done with yours?

And what would be the point if they can access stuff at their friend's house?

Why can't you let parents adopt the simple measures that, whilst not perfect, will protect some children. Why are you so against that?

Can you answer without being sarcastic?

most parents won't know what a raspberry pi

402 threads on Mumsnet:

www.mumsnet.com/info/search?query=raspberry+pi

Not every parent is a Mumsnetter. Thank God.

Cliff as I said in my last post "It doesn't cover what they can see when they are not at home, but it's something." so I'm fully aware of that.

I realise that was sarcasm, but your anger/irritation is not getting us closer to doing something useful. What Friday and Bruxeur are saying is the truth and as someone else said 'shooting the messenger' doesn't help.

I don't have any dc young enough now for it to be useful, but I could probably set up similar defenses myself. I already run servers on a PC that's always on for other things that I do. I was hoping for something for other people to use who don't have the time to become expert in a whole new area.

Friday, thanks for that. I can see that it is doable, though tricky to make a one-size fits all solution.

BackOnlyBriefly that was my response to friday, that the simple filters don't cover everything but is a start. It's something useful that parents can do. However I've been told that this does more harm than good and that I'm an igorant illiterate for my troubles.

So how does your take on it differ from mine so much?

Not even what friday has set up at her home is infallible and that is the truth. No-one is shooting the messenger here. What myself and others were saying is just what you said. That is all. That's the huge argument that has ensued.

Just as an aside, we coined a phrase in one of my schools to describe the attitude and teaching ability of some of the IT bofs who came in to eddikate us on computers back in the day.
'Peter Pan Syndrome'
Nothing to do with eternal youth, and more 'Cockadoodledoo, Oh the cleverness of me.'

So busy showing us their skill and using jargon and clicking and typing fasterthantheeyecouldsee that they shut out most of the audience.
Which either meant that they gave up trying to understand and switched off, or considered IT so very difficult that only a tech could handle it, and thus were many, many IT jobs in education created.
Parents often don't know how.
People are often either poor at explaining, or smug about their esoteric knowledge, or both.
Everyone ends up grumpy or worried, or sighing at the perceived stupidity of others.
Hasn't changed much in 30 years.

how does your average parent, with a basic grasp of the internet, protect kids like you have done with yours?

Talk to them, keep an eye on what they're doing, take an interest.

And what would be the point if they can access stuff at their friend's house?

Porn site are a heavy business. They're absolutely laden with malware, so machines which regularly access porn are likely to acquire all sorts of coughs and sneezles. That alone makes a "not under my roof" policy sensible.

I'm not sure (and perhaps it's my middle-class naiveté) that collaborative porn watching is a thing, as porn is usually a fairly solitary occupation, and I'm willing to gamble that is X% of children have access to porn at home, only (X/Y)%, for quite a large Y, are willing to show it to their friends. They would, for example, then be reliant on their friends not telling their friend's parents. "Oh, they just look at it at their friends' houses" seems like quite a considerable cop-out, and I'd want to see some evidence that this happening at anything like the rate of people viewing porn alone in their own houses.

Why can't you let parents adopt the simple measures that, whilst not perfect, will protect some children.

The onus is on people proposing inadequate measures to show that the benefit outweighs the unintended consequences. I don't think that case is remotely made that the simple measures are of any significant value, and I think the false sense of security is a serious problem.

Select "Incognito Mode".

You can disable incognito mode (and its equivalent in other browsers) if you are willing to edit the registry. And if you give your children their own user profile on your machine, make sure they don't have admin rights and don't give them your they won't be able to turn it back on again. So the search lock will remain locked.

I am not saying that parents are generally sufficiently tech savvy to do this stuff, although good parental controls software will do a lot of it for you. But it is possible for someone who knows what they are doing to lock things down so that Google SafeSearch is locked and there is no way for children to get round it.

Perhaps we should be campaigning for super-routers that are elaborate enough to run flexible filter software. They could even have a physical key to stop tampering.

They would need to be able to apply different filters to each PC and perhaps change them at certain times in the day, yet have a straightforward interface that anyone could learn.

You may also be able to do it without editing the registry using group/local policies. I've only used those occasionally so I couldn't say where off hand.

Even then google is just one search engine. I did a quick google to see how many search engines there might be and found
www.100searchengines.com which will let you search using 100 of them.

That last was about incognito mode.