Parental Controls and Linux

[Brian Cluff]

> Let's be reasonable.
> I have an 8 yo girl and 16 month old son.
> How I decide to monitor/filter their access is my parental right
> and how anyone else does it is theirs.
> I am all for parents doing *anything* to monitor access.
> The INternet was not built for children so lets keep that in perspective.

Thats is exactly how it should be.  These days with all the talk about
filtering. I see more and more people trying to tell everyone that there
should be no filtering of any kind.  That parents themselves shouldn't have
the right to dictate what comes over the internet that they provide for
their childeren.
    When I am a parent, I will teach my kids right from wrong the way I
want, and one of those is that porno is not exacly the best thing to be
spending their time with.  When they are young, they will do like mommy and
daddy ask them, but when they get older, they start to think they know
everything.
    I would hope that I my parenting techniques wouldn't have to involve
putting what I dont want in my childs hands, directly in fron to their fact
all the time.  In other words, I wouldn't want someone to require me to have
sevral prono videos in mixed in with the videos that the kids watch.

With the attitudes that some people have, you would think they would expect
you to tell your kids not to do drugs their entire lives, then expect you to
leave lines of coke on the coffee table all the time, because after all, if
you have taught your children correctly, they is no way they are going to
touch that coke.... at least till your not looking.


From being in the professionaly blocking business for the last 4.5 years, I
can tell you that not all parents were aware of their childrens surfings
habbits.  I would often find kids early in the morning on a porno crusade
trying to track down any and every site that leaked though the filter.  I
would often after a few repeted days of that sort of action from a
particular user notify the account holder that they might want to watch the
useage of their system a little closer if they were worried about it.  They
would usualy tell me that they didn't think that it was their child doing
that sort of thing, and I would tell them that I had their account logged on
from 2am to 4am, thats about the time I would hear something like.  You know
little johnny has been hard to wake up in the mornings lately.  I usually
heard back later from those same families telling me that they wanted extra
protection on the internet that their son had a real problem with the naked
ladies, and a few times men and animals, or worse, and they weren't have a
very good time keeping them off the computer, as they were very computer
savey and were unsupervised for a couple hours after school till their
parents came home.

Anyway... thats way waaaaaaaaaaay more than I wanted to type in first place.
Maybe I should have started it off with Dennis Millers "Now I don't want to
get off on a rant here" :)

Brian Cluff