Did it really say that?!
Also James Dobson’s two cents on this issue (surprisingly moderate) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_masturbation
Question for those of you who have site monitoring hardware schemes (proxy servers, etc): How do you go about parsing the ip addresses as to whats safe and whats not. By this I mean, my router’s logs just give ip address, and I know I’d have no idea how to tell Google’s IP address from www.spankomaxx.com ?
I took a two pronged approach to the problem, all the time knowing that you can’t keep a teen from looking for pictures of nekked ladies. The idea was to limit the kinds of porn to some of the less freaky stuff. This was in the earlier days of the internet, say 2000, when there was a lot of free and very strange stuff out there.
The whole process started when my son was 12 and he left some seriously raunchy images on the screen (animals were involved.) One of the endearing qualities of teenaged boys is their cluelessness. We had a long talk about porn and sex that may have killed any interest he may have had in sex for the next few years. I told him that I didn’t object to porn itself but that there is a lot of stuff out that he just doesn’t understand yet.
Prong 1: I tried a web blocker that basically blocked any sites that Norton thought was porn. This worked pretty well except that it was a huge drag on the computer and it was really easy to find other sites not on the blocked list.
Prong 2: I know how to check the history and how to scan the images that browsers save. So he was stuck with either figuring out how to delete all that stuff, and tipping me off, or with just not going to those sites. I think the knowledge that his dad would be browsing the same sites as him was kind of a turn off and we never had a real problem.
The bottom line is that a 12 year old really don’t know anything about sex - he really shouldn’t start with bestiality and group S&M, those are advanced courses. So the question is, how can I let him look at pictures of starlets with their tops off yet keep him from seeing the hard-core stuff? I think that involves letting him know I am watching and what I will allow.
My server logs are quite readable, and translate IP addresses to DNS names.
Si
A nice quote which I intend to steal and call my own. Sums up a lot of my beliefs of rearing teenagers.
Color me disappointed that that’s not a real site… 
Which is why all of the cool kids use torrents.
Sorry… only in the fanciful world of me 
Don’t bother. As many others here have noted, unless your kid is a moron he can get around any actions you take. What you ought to do is have a BRIEF, GENERAL, impersonal talk with him about the real online dangers associated with porn sites. Tell him that you won’t pay to fix the damn thing if he clogs it up with viruses, and he’ll have to pay for it himself. Have a quick mention or two about being safe online re: chats, Im’s, etc… And mention that online relationships are an extremely poor idea. This all can be easily, and with little embarassment, mentioned in a general “rules of the road” type talk.
No censorship of any kind, ever, in our household!! I can’t even imagine…! :eek:
PCPandora is a program that logs everything and takes screen snapshots at regular intervals such as every 20 seconds or whatever, pausing after a pre-designated length of inactivity. It can take actual snapshots of who is on the computer so you if the teen claims somebody else was using the computer, you can check. You can block access to any program, website, set the hours the computer can be used, and a zillion other things. It isn’t a porn filter, though.
My kids pick up viruses all the time from sites like youtube and myspace. They don’t understand that when the antivirus programs screams out a warning, you shouldn’t tell it to ignore it so you can continue with what you were doing.
You can’t get viruses from Youtube. :dubious:
I’m pretty sure the stupid is infectious if you read the comments.
I assume he/she was talking about clicking on skeevy-looking links spammed in the comments.
That, and the myspace-related sites that offer myspace page-layout programs and cute cursors and add-on toolbars. For a time, there was a so-called media-viewer ad on myspace that implied that you had to download it to view content, and when you did it would install a virus or worm or something. The pre-installed Vista sidebar weather widget got my kids to install its own weather toolbar (“no, I don’t remember telling it to!”) complete with shopping site suggestions and home page changes. It’s my own fault for letting them have admin privileges. (It’s amazing how many blaring antivirus siren warnings they can ignore.)
Maybe some boys aren’t, but when I started getting unrestricted Internet access at age 16 in 1994 (my parents didn’t even know what kind of stuff was out there), the violent / gruesome images of death really disturbed me, much more than pictures of people having sex did. Ironic, since a year earlier I’d been quite scandalized when my hippie-looking English teacher told us that, if he had kids, he’d be much more concerned about “violence porn” like the Faces of Death movies than about regular porn. “Violence is a lot less evil than sex!” I’d always been taught, “unless it’s actual murder.” Boy, was I wrong.
ETA: Oh yeah, and I totally know what your daughter meant. I was like, “God, please wipe those images of the kid with his hand caught in the meat grinder and the car accident victims from my head. PLEASE?” Sadly, he never listened.