Can we actually filter online porn?

[mortimerlake]

As both a teccie and a concerned (and hopefully reasonable parent) ... I find the notion of having my children exposed to porn unsettling. Yet i see considerable debate and the demand on our government to be seen to control pornographic content.

I posted on another site ... theconversation.com/porn-licensing-online-isnt-going-to-deter-the-digital-generation-24993 over a week ago, it seems that this is an interesting 'sideways' view of the issue, where this academic seems to imply that no matter what the government does cyber criminals will try other ways.

The article is a bit incoherent, but it think the general idea of making sure kids know that what they get up to online can be seen by parents is a good one. It's equivalent of having the only computer in public space, adapted for iPads etc.

Porn sites have no interest in children watching them and will not try to get round filters - children do not have credit cards to pay for the various things they are advertising or pay for content. Children are often better than parents at understanding the net and getting round filters

you can always use the parental control to block particular websites, I would rely on the government, rather do it by yourself...

Have you seen the (many) earlier threads on this?

Search for the 'unicorn' post by empusa

There isn't going to be a techie magic bullet. The government cannot control this (though they like to posture). I think it comes down to educating your DC about online safety, and remembering that the only thing that will moderate a teens taste for violence, drugs, porn or whatever (in RL or online) are the standards, attitudes and values they absorb as they grow.

Parental control filters on DC's devices will help (the devices themselves, not your home ISP, so they are still protected if they use them in another place). But they are far from infallible.

The academic was not posturing.

As soon as you get one link on to the internet, you basically have all the internet. There are ways to stop your link connecting to certain other places, but there are not ways to stop connecting to someone else who forwards your link to those places.

Isn't a straight forward approach just to make sure they can only surf in a family room, not by themselves?

There are methods but unfortunately none are foolproof.

Sadly the government plans have amounted to nothing more than censorship in disguise which is sad.

Whatever you do, if they want to find porn, they will find it. When my son is older I have already accepted the fact that he will be exposed to it either at his own will or his friends. What i plan to do is rather than discourage it because generally speaking I don't think porn is dangerous, I will be putting it into context for him.

Context is what is largely missing in the discussion about children viewing porn. To condemn it can be more damaging and give them warped ideas about sex.

There has always been porn, you can see gay porn on ancient greek pottery in museums. You either ignore it or try to get your kids view of sexuality to be responsible, all censorship does is hide from parents what their kids see.

Also what is porn ?

There's stuff on Wikipedia that's quite graphic and Dr.Who has had men kissing and two characters are involved in a relationship that is both lesbian and bestiality (female Silurian and a Victorian female human). It will shock no one to learn the man in charge of Who is a gay man.

That's not porn, or rather I don't call it that, but I don't freak out a the thought of a gay couple, some parents do, whose view should trump the others.

There's no perfect solution, there are applications that attempt to filter known adult sites but new ones pop up all the time so it's never a 100% solution. Also kids are smart and often find ways around.

I think the best approach is to use OpenDNS (www.opendns.com/) but you may need someone techy to help set it up.

Essentially how the Internet works is when you type in a website address, that address is sent to a computer server called a DNS which looks up something called an IP address which is a set of numbers that tells the browser where the content for that website exists on the Internet. Your browser then goes to that IP address to get the content.

How OpenDNS works is you switch to their more fancy DNS which includes filters for blocking content. So you can turn on the porn filter and when anyone on any machine on your home network types in an address to a porn site then the DNS refuses to return the IP address, effectively blocking it to every device in your home. So there's nothing to install on your machines and every device gets the porn filter. Best of all is it's free or it used to be. It still relies on their list of known porn sites so isn't 100% but it's a nice option.

In reality no matter what you do your children may stumble across some porn so better to have the Internet safety talk so it doesn't come as a shock and they know to just press the close button.