Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/15/vpns-r-us.html
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Having two young boys in the house, things like this interest me. My wife wants to do a communial computer in a living space so we can keep an eye on their surfing habits…but really that’s only going to last so long. I’d really rather know where they’ve been than just block everything. That way, hopefully I can talk to them about what they are seeing. I mean when I was a young teen an interlaced gif downloading over 56k was the bee’s knees…now well, let’s just say some things can’t be unseen.
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Visit tblop.com, choose ANY website, enter “British.”
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Porn blocks are an excuse to censor information, real-time. Hideo Kojima called this with his prophetic masterpiece, Metal Gear Solid 2
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Get it all out of the way early.
Sit them down and regularly have a chat about what’s going on in the world. As parents, our instinct is to shield our children. But they deserve to know the truth. Start with Collateral Damage and discuss the effects of our perpetual warrior culture. Talk about the importance of consent - you can use a video of "social experiments - and demonstrate that it’s only fun when everyone is having fun.
More importantly, learn to forgive. Forgive yourself; they will say and do things you wish you could prevent. Learn to forgive them; they will hurt out of ignorance, not malice.
I wish my parents had been honest with me. Instead, I was rudely awakened to the reality of the world we’ve inherited.
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They… they considered children who accessed porn? And they did not punish these children severely? Is that not like considering a murder in progress, and not calling the police? Except, of course, looking at naked people is far far worse than murder.
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It’s lucky that the UK is just rolling deep in spending money these days, so paying an army of nerds to nerd really hard to overcome this little trifle should be no biggie.
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I think games are the biggest risk. My son’s school has a requirement for an ipad for junior students and a laptop for senior students. On the surface the portability is seen as a plus but in practice it makes it too easy for the kids to goof off when they are supposed to be studying.
My son has a serious gaming addition, as well as spending too much time networking with friends. The tablets, laptops and smart phones make it almost impossible for us to regulate it.
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Is there any scientific study that shows that watching porn has detrimental effects on children?
I’m sure there are some studies, if it’s not obvious enough. We are really in the midst of a grand experiment. There are a lot of anecdotal stories on Reddit of young men who got hooked on porn anywhere from age 10 up, and it kinda derailed their normal development. Including oddly enough ED in their late teens early twenties. Also, kids are learning about sex from internet porn, which is setting up some bizarre expectations. See Cindy Gallop’s talk on the noticeable shift in the younger men’s she dates behaviors and expectations.
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I worry about this too.
20 Years ago smut used to be something you had to go out of your way to seek out. Those magazines behind the counter, or the sketchy “News” store.
Now there is a hard-core pornography pipeline hooked up to most of our homes that you need to plug to some degree or another just to keep your family safe!
I run OpenDNS at the house to provide some safety for the kids ( and also to help myself avoid temptation.)
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Doesn’t matter whether it works or not, they have to be seen to be doing something so they can say something has been done. The blocked project shows how ISP filters overblock with abandon.
You can buy an Amazon tablet for the cost of a few snow shoveling or grass cutting jobs these days. If I were a kid today and my parents filtered the devices they bought me, I would just get my own porn device.
I am very lucky this didn’t happen in my youth because porn is a heckuva drug.
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