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Originally Posted by Isabella
Yes, we should be protecting our children from porn! When I caught my son at 12 years old looking at porn on the computer, I installed NetNanny. The computer would shut down everytime he went to a site he was not allowed to view. There definitely should be laws to protect our children from porn.
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I've seen those kinds of programs. I don't care for them much because programs don't always know how to distinguish a good website from a bad one without having you fill out a list of authorized sites (which can get very cumbersome). Most programs do a search through the meta data of the site which often nails them down pretty accurately. Unfortunately, there are some programs that will lock out otherwise proper websites in this manner. For an example, educational websites about the reproductive system or drug/alcohol awareness may get blocked. Some programs like to block websites that are religious in nature (how's that for mind-blowing?). And you may not notice that a LOT of porn sites are greatly reducing the ASCII data on their pages and using graphics and image mapping in order to slip around those very programs. Computer programs cannot recognize the content in one big graphic with links embedded in it. The sites look the same, but without the text-based data in the pages, your NetNanny might not even know what kind of site you are looking at. This is how many spammers are getting around spam blockers. Instead of sending text e-mails, they are sending large pictures with all of the text in them.
My favorite method is not to have the computer enforce your child's Internet experience, but install a program that will do periodically random screen dumps that you can check to see if your child has gone to a site that he/she shouldn't be going to. Such programs will take screen shots randomly and hide them somewhere on the computer. If you find a large screen shot from a porn site among them, the jig's up. This way, the computer only monitors your child's experience and you are the one who enforces it.