My crusade for web content filtering

[Michael Vanecek]

My $1.05 cents, keep the change...

A big part of the lesson of life is learning how to process information.
Where the information comes from is irrelevent. Preventing accidents
will only cause more problems in the long run and even cause accidents.
Frankly, kids are more resilient than we give them credit for. If they
see something they have been taught to dislike, they ignore it and move
on. My kids hate Barney and those stupid little Teletubbies - when it
comes on the television, they change the channel. Additionally, they've
been taught to dislike graphic commercials and shows and they avert
their eyes or change the channel while simultaniously re-inforcing their
teaching by acting on the attitudes we've taught them to have. We teach
them by experience and being role-models. In this world it's impossible
and damaging to try to build a wall around the children. 

Our kids are two and four. In spite of them being crafty little
monsters, they love to please us and to copy us - very typical of most
children. Becuase we encourage communication, they are quick to inform
us when we say something or do something unacceptable, and we encourage
that and quickly repent from our goof-ups. Heh, and you thought the
president was under close scrutiny. Any adult - mother and father
included, should be aware of mistakes and accidentally coming to an
unsavory website/National Geographic picture/TV show. If they have
confidence in their kids, it shouldn't shock them. Just say "Oh yuck"
and move on. Kids pick up on your distaste in it and emulate it. In time
it becomes a prevailing attitude that will be what protects them when
they go out to parties, hang out behind the school, and are faced with a
myriad of temptations. It's kinda like surfing the TV with your kids
only to find out Pay-Per-View was having a promo. Go "Eeewwww, yuck" and
change the channel. They associate the images on the TV with your
distaste and that reinforces their own distaste of it. 

Hey, under normal situations, they'd rather watch a cartoon.
Spread-eagle girls just aren't that interesting to them at an early age
unless we the parents make a big deal out of it. We're what makes this
stuff interesting to the kids. If you get to them early enough, when the
sexual curiosity eventually does start to surface later on, they'll have
a buffer of control that will help get them through the boiling-hormone
years. A lot of people make a big deal out of this and expend a
tremendous amount of energy trying to cover it up. They're even creating
a filter to block sites with "skin tone". Yeah, right - that'll hurt the
bathing suite retailers while the porn sites get busy altering the color
balance of their images to get around it. 

It's better just to realize that accidents happen and life goes on. This
realization will be what protects the kids. Tell them not to play with
fire and they're going to burn your house down. Put them in charge of
the grill fire once and a while or the camp fire and "Awe Dad, I'm
bored" will quickly be the result. Kids are in learning mode and are
sponges with an incredible hunger for information. Making something
Taboo will only give that hunger a target. The primary question will be
"Why" and then the secondary reaction will be the rush of doing
something that's taboo. But if the attitude is "Ho Humm, another crummy
site, lets look at something more interesting" it's no longer "Taboo"
and becomes "One of those boring and yucky sites". 

Of course, we're still playing a balancing act - you could go too far
with that and spark their "Morbid Curiosity". It's a matter of reading
your kids, knowing them and watching them. Watch their actions and watch
how they emulate you. Once you set a pattern, you are creating a person
that will hopefully do the same thing with their kids and so forth and
with a shrinking market perhaps the porn webmasters will have to find
employment at Burger King or some such. The alternative is that they'll
grow up secretly getting hooked on the adreniline rush of commiting acts
of Taboo and actually patronize these sites keeping them in business.
Did Madonna get rich because she's a good singer? Nope - she's a dime a
dozen when it comes to singing. Did she get rich because of her
"incredible" body? Not - she's actually rather plain compared to most of
what's out there. She appealed to the Taboo curiosity of our culture -
especially when the "Do Gooders" criticized her and made her even more
"Taboo". Her marketing strategy was to be more contreversial than the
next person. When she became a "Naughty" girl, bucks started rolling in.
Hmmm, where are my speedos... :)

A lot of people view the internet as a something private like a magazine
- they want to have only pleasing magazines in their house and throw out
all the displeasing ones. A better way to view the internet is as a
window to a huge public bazaar. You have no control over the bazaar and
attempts to put a filter on the window only impedes normal traffic and
tends to be useless if you know what to expect and know how to hit that
back button to go to another "booth" in that bazaar. 

I have yet to see ANY filter that actually is worth taking space on my
system. I value the grey matter between my ears and the ears of my kids
for keeping that filth off my systems over any software I could install.
Teaching the children effective internet browsing will also be a big
help. I spend over 100 hours a week on the internet and run an ISP and
it's been months since I've accidentally come across one of those sites.
And when I do, I usually realize it before it completely loads in (being
full of pictures and animations and all that garbage does have it's
advantage for regular 56K connections in this case but is a mute point
for those of you with broadband connections), I hit the back button or
close the browser window before I'm assaulted by the garbage these guys
push. Teaching them to read URLs and see patterns and being aware of the
tactics that porn sites use to lure or trick you in is a major
educational excersize that will be of more value than filtering those
sites out altogether. So work on putting the garbage filter where it
will be most effective - in the heads of your kids. What they learn will
have spin-off benefits in other areas of life too...

But then, I'm just a geek with kids, so what do I know... :)

Mike

Kevin Saling wrote:
> 
> Heh, I'm not trying to create a totalitarian network where the filtering is
> absolute.  All I'm trying to do is provide some guidance for kids and avoid
> the accidental filth from popping up on the browser.  If kids want to seek
> it out, it's not within my power to prevent it...  they _will_ find it.
> That's a parental guidance issue, not a technological one.  I'm only
> interested in preventing the accidental exposure to inappropriate material
> (as defined by the party in charge of the filter) for the younger ones.
> 
> If you don't believe this is a problem, consider this little incident that
> got me started down this road.
> 
> A child was web surfing with her mother looking for a friend's birthday
> gift.  The child had seen www.generationgirl.com advertised on a box of
> cereal.  She mistakenly typed in www.girl.com and gave her mother quite a
> shock.
> 
> Anyway, philosophy aside, my understanding is that squid does _not_ provide
> access to the data stream.  ActiveGuardian has serious compile issues and
> JunkEx (once I finally got it installed with help from the developer in
> Germany) doesn't work for this purpose.
> 
> I am now considering writing my own proxy that will simply pipe the
> datastream through a perl script or something before delivering it to the
> browser.  Any page that matched one of the keywords would have the entire
> contents between <html> and </html> replaced with a text message.  Simple,
> but probably very slow.  Not to mention, I have NO idea how to code this.
> 
> ...Kevin