“No, clearly you don’t, since you’re recording every effing thing I do. Note to self, hide the porn mags and pot stash better, and never talk to my parents about anything questionable, since their solution to moral quandries will be intricate surveilance.”
Or so sayeth the teenager. I would have been both completely insulted and thoroughly disgusted with my parent for installing such software, and would have purposely done everything I could to get around it simply to prove that I could. Barring that, I’d just go over to a friend’s house and use his, or get myself a couple magazines or videos. My opinion, the worst thing a parent can do for the trust bond with their children is to go big brother–in my experience, this tends to have the exact opposite desired effect.
Okay, I think we may want to dismiss the porn thing as a concern.
What I can see as a legitimate concern is chatting on the internet. A lot of folks who don’t really understand it or spend much time on the computer can be (very understandably) made afraid by all the stories of the predators who hunt kids in chat rooms.
Until I was in, say, the 9th or 10th grade, I didn’t have my own computer. The only chat I frequented was Compuserve, which was highly moderated. If your sister wants to protect him from random chat folks, I’d suggest she lay down a rule that he can only IM with people he knows in real life, and that he is only allowed to frequent chat sites that she knows to be moderated.
I am still dealing with this, though I’m 21 now. Obviously there are no rules imposed on my computer usage, but it is difficult sometimes to convince my parents that I won’t be killed going to a Dopefest.
Though they really don’t do the internet thing, they’ve been pretty good. They’ve dealt with me going to New York, and even London and staying with dopers. The key is to demystify it. Once she met (and served breakfast and coffee!) to some dopers, she understood that they were real people who told the truth about their identity online.
Well, if the parents want to prevent their 14 year-old from viewing porn & other stuff, the most effective solution, already mentioned by other Dopers, is to move the computer to a public place. Give the kid enough time alone with the computer and ANY protection you place on it will be defeated. Kids tend to be a lot more tech-savy than their parents, and relying on tech-based solutions will cause them to lose out in the long run.
The other solution is to trust the kid not to do really stupid stuff- liking using the parental credit card, arranging to meet total stranges for sex, ect, and realizing that the if the kid looks at porn, it isn’t going to hurt him any. I mean, thoughout my teenage years, I browsed through lots of porn sites, and it didn’t twist me or cause me to be a pervert or turn out twisted.
Now that this thread has a healthy number of posts, you should simply send the kid a link to it, and show him what a ruckus he’s inadvertently caused among so many strangers.
That’s putting an awful lot of trust on the kid. More trust than some parents apparently have, it seems. Because software like the one I posted to above, along with NetNanny and the like, make quite a bit of money, and are incorporated into a lot of different systems.
Maybe their kids aren’t as trustworthy as yours. Or maybe they know something we don’t; like their kid’s not trustworthy, or they need a little encouragement to do the right thing.
It’s seems like a reasonable thing to me, but who knows, I don’t have kids.
You’re missing the point. The software you recommend is USELESS against the even the most minimally skilled user! If the parent can’t accepth occasional porn viewing and talk to their kid enough to teach him not to meet random strangers, there is a bigger problem and it ain’t something BlackBox can fix.
Come again? Useless in terms of the Knoppex deal? You’re dealing with a whole different OS in that situation. One that takes a bit to get going and fully functional. It isn’t just a snap of the fingers to operate, despite what dread says.
Well no shit Sherlock. I never said the software replaces a parent. I said it’s a particularily useful tool that parents might find appropriate for their situation. Parents that may not be as trusting as you seem to be.
By the way, do you have kids? Or is this how you’re planning to act whenever you have some?
Like I said above, I don’t have kids but I would hope whenever that day comes, that I’ll assume the kid knows right and wrong from things I’ve taught 'em. But on the off chance that I might have a kid that I’m really not so sure about, and I asked others what solutions were available, I’d want to know my options without all the BS.
Or maybe those parents are just ignorant, puritan, control freaks.
A technical solution probably isn’t going to work - and it definitely won’t work if the kid knows about it. A secretly installed hardware keylogger is the most robust solution… but what does it say about a parent, if she has to stoop to installing devices inside her son’s computer in order to avoid having The Talk About Porn with him?
You must not be familiar with Knoppix - it’s a self-configuring Linux distribution that runs from a CD. It really is as easy to use as it sounds. If this kid can download a file, burn a CD, and turn on a computer, then he can get around any web filters that his parents install.
You miss the part where I said the mom sat the kids down and told them about it?
She did. And that’s what I’d do too, if I were dealing with the same issues.
I know about it in the sense that I’ve read about and know it’s an easy version of Linux. I might even have the ISO on my other system, I don’t know. I was into that for a bit.
What I don’t understand is why you guys criticize me and talk about trust but have no problem with moving the kids computer next to yours, or looking over their shoulder.
Isn’t the software solution just the same?
How is it different?
I mean, I get the impression you guys say, ‘Trust the kids. Talk to them. They’ll know right from wrong and choose accordingly on their own. And if not, then no big deal’. And then that’s it. You’re done.
In terms of morality, I agree with you ** CnoteChris * I don’t see any difference between software monitoring, and physical monitoring. If a parent wants to know what their kid is looking at, they are perfectly in the right to use software or to watch over the kid’s shoulder.
The reason I don’t like the software solutions to monitoring the kid is that they * won’t work * as well as physical monitoring, not because either method is “immoral” or anything like that. If the software * was * working with the child, I personally would think the kid is too stupid to be let onto the internet alone.
If the parents want to leave the computer in the kids room, and give him large periods of time alone on the internet, trust, and talking it out with the kid is the only thing they can do. This is because any reasonably intelligent kid will be able to break ANY software protection the parents have, if they have enough time alone on the machine.
That is why I mentioned, if they want to prevent the kid from viewing porn, physical monitoring is the only effective way to due it; and it is perfectly within the parents rights to stop the kid from viewing porn (or any other information, for that matter).
You miss the part where I was talking about something entirely different?
If you say “Hey Billy, I put a device inside your computer that records the keys you type,” and Billy knows how to use a screwdriver, then you aren’t going to record many naughty keys. OTOH, if he doesn’t know about it, chances are he isn’t going to look inside his computer just for kicks.
The same is true of filtering/monitoring software, if the kid is savvy enough. If he knows it’s there, he can easily find out how to get around it, no matter how foolproof the manufacturer would like you to think it is.
Moving the kid’s computer into the living room is up-front (i.e. the kid knows exactly what’s being monitored and when), and requires the parents to use actual judgment (unlike filtering software) and to invest their own time to snoop (unlike key loggers).
What’s wrong with that? No one ever died from looking at porn, or even from playing “certain games”.
I had my first PC with internet connection in my room when I was about 15. Yes, within about a week I’d absorbed more porn than I ever imagined existed. It really isn’t a big deal at all.
I say the best thing to do would be to talk to the kid about how to be smart on the internet (don’t pay for porn, don’t give out your credit card no. or any other personal info out to anyway, steer clear from stupid chat rooms, etc.) than to install some totally inefficient net filtering software (although if you want to be particularly despotic, AOL has child filters that block everything) that he’ll get around in about half an hour.
If God is going to come down and smite him for looking at porn or something, keeping the PC in a public place is by far the best bet. Make no mistake - if he wants to, he’ll still be looking at tons of porn, but I guess his parents can feel like they tried to stop it or something.
I think it’s damn near impossible to be around the kid twenty-four seven and always know what their doing on the computer by looking over their shoulder. There’s bound to be times when you’re not around, or otherwise busy. And don’t underestimate apathy. After a week or two of checking out what their up to, I doubt you’ll be all that interested in what their doing anymore. Give that awhile and the kid to be doing god knows what.
Not that I think kids are inherently bad or anything, or are dying to go against their parents. It’s just that I was a kid once and I knew I had my parents beat hands down in the endurance area. Sooner or later they were going to slack off and eventually not pay attention.
Right. Knoppix.
Personally, I don’t see a kid going to all that trouble, or wasting that much time finding alternatives to get on the net. I just don’t see it happening. But again, I’m not a parent, and I really don’t know how advanced, or willing to get at porn and the like, kids really are these days. I assume it’s just a curiosity, or naivety, in certain sitautions, that guides them more than anything else. If that’s assumed, than I doubt much needs to be taken to stop it. But you’re right, if they really want it, they’re going to find it.
No dispute there.
Again, agreed. And never in dispute, actually. I consider ‘the talk’ and all its accompaning parental stuff a necessity. But sometimes parents want proof, or reassurances that what they’ve said is actually being followed.
Then we’ll have to agree on disagreeing, because I don’t see how your approach will succeed over time. After three months of the kid being an angel, I doubt you’ll be as interested in what he’s up to since he’s been so good before.
Apathy. Never underestimate it.
But you are going to know he’s been fucking with the computer. Even in the Knoppix deal above, if the kid disapears for two hours and you know he’s on the net, and you check the logs later and nothing shows up, all hell’s going to break loose. Lack of evidence is evidence too.
And maybe you don’t realize just how invasive that software is. The thing records everything. Which windows were opened, which programs were run, which webpages were viewed, and what was typed in.
You look through the logs later and see johnny heading towards the program file and looking for the logger, or looking up stuff on the internet to defeat it, it’ll all be there in black and white. It’s not just a walk in the park to get around it. And even if they do, somehow, you’ll see plain as day how they did it.
I split up your sentence because I wanted to address this issue on its own.
When I went to set this up with the friend/mom, I made sure she told the kids what was up. That is, that software was going to be put on the computer that would watch all. Not doing so, to me, would be wrong… bordering on underhanded and unethical. I’m sure some people do it, but it’s not for me and not an approach I would either condone, or do.
That’s just crossing the line, in my opinion.
Some parents don’t have that kind of time, or level of commitment to monitor their kids that others do. For them, something like what I recommended earlier and set up can be of use.
And that was the whole point of this thread-- alternatives and solutions to, what I assume, are the basics. I gave one solution that happened to work well for a friend.
But they have gotten into trouble with things like instant messenger. That’s what this mom was most worried about, with two daughters. Her son, and his porn viewing habits, were more of an afterthought and a bonus to the worries she had about predators and other nastiness on the net. If she caught him sneaking porn in the process of protecting her daughters, than so be it. He’d get the ‘talk’ again.
And in terms of the girls? Personally I think the whole online predator thing is overplayed and hype. But to that parent it wasn’t, and she was genuinely worried that her kids would blow off what she had said and eventually get themselves into trouble. Again, I have a hard time arguing against that fear and worry.
Not so shy, are you?
I agree that filters are ineffective. I’ve never recommended them and never would. Way too easy to get around.
This other program though, isn’t as easy, in my opinion.
By the way, what were your parents rules, if any, when it came to porn, chatrooms, and the like?
Why would he look it up on that computer, if he knows his every action is logged? He’ll go to the library or a friend’s house.
It sounds like that company’s marketing dollars were well-spent on you.
If they aren’t committed enough to actually monitor their kids and use real human judgment, they shouldn’t expect some invasive spyware to do it for them. The computer is not a babysitter.
As long as we’re sharing experiences… I first had an internet connection in my room around age 12. I chatted on IRC and MUDs, and downloaded a bit of porn from Usenet (back when a single JPEG took minutes to download and several seconds for my 286 to decode).
There was no filtering or monitoring, and I turned out just fine. My parents knew about the chatting. I didn’t tell them about the porn, but I’m sure they knew - I used their newsreader (this was a shell account), didn’t cover my tracks very well, and they found those tracks at least once.
what I find very amusing is that many of you boy posters seem to be identifying way more with the kid than with the parent. I find it interesting that you are so invested in some random kid’s access to porn. Some of you are quite insistent that you got lots of porn and turned out just fine, but that’s just kind of anecdotal. That argument can be made once or twice about just about anything.
How come so few of you are identifying with the parent here?
Personally, I’m not a boy, but I’m closer to being a kid than a parent. I guess I identify with the kid more because I can easily remember being that age and what it felt like to be that kid. When I was a teenager, my parents suspected I was on drugs. Their response was extreme invasions of privacy, looking through my room, reading my personal letters and such, and I can remember how totally demoralizing that was, how it felt to be so completely distrusted. I can sure as hell tell you, that if my parents had just talked to me like a human being, I would have been far more open with them. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t doing drugs, I had a major eating disorder, and having my parents react the way they did (with extreme distrust, rather than concern) just drove me further and further inside myself, and caused problems I’m only now beginning to undo.
I can’t ever believe that, short of obvious criminal activity, going big brother style with 24 hour surveilance is an intelligent, sensible, or humane way to relate to your children.
I couldn’t care less about whether 14-year-old Billy Stranger from Rapegoat, Montana gets to look at boobies or not. (No one ever died from not looking at porn, either.)
But I do care about putting an end to the notion that it’s appropriate or honorable to deny your kids privacy. It may be legal, but it’s still despicable. Teenagers are people, not prisoners or property.
I’ll chip in with my thoughts. First, I’m closer to the boy then the parent (I’m 20). Yes, I looked up my fair share of porn on my computer once I got it in my own room.
I also agree that if the boy’s get much knowledge of computers at all, he can get past anything. Some people will do lots for their porn fix, trust me. Although I’m not sure he’d go to the library or a friend’s house. What boy wants to be seen looking up porn in public? I know I’d be scared someone would catch me.
As to what to do, that’s something else. Hm. If he doesn’t mod his computer much and care about what’s attached to it (ie won’t go looking around to see what’s new on his box), a keyboard logger like this might work. It doesn’t use software, so he won’t see it in Task Manager, and it works if he’s using Windows or Linux. But if he’d look for that, then it’s easily noticable.
Something like Black Box is just a security measure to let him know that he’s being watched. He can pretty much choose to ignore it, or feed it what he wants it to see.
