Anon writes: Why is it the public's responsibility to protect other people's children from porn? Why is it the public's responsibility to provide schooling, crossing guards, crosswalks, stop signs, or for that matter to protect children from predators? Is that all a waste of your tax dollars? I say it is the parent's responsibility to monitor this stuff. I couldn't agree more that parents need to be involved. My own then pre-teen children were writing code and hacking back when there were almost no other children to be found online. They still needed to be monitored and made cyberstreetwise as there were already pedophiles online who pretended to be children. But leaving it entirely up to parents just doesn't work, we're dealing with non-tech savvy parents monitoring non-tech savvy children to protect them from tech-savvy predators. Buy filtering software and use it! There are many pieces of software that can filter URLS, eliminate pop-up ads, and ad banners And there is counter-software to defeat that. I don't care for filtering software, for a number of reasons, here's a few. And as my submission dealt in part with porn sites buying up and using previously childfriendly URLs (did you even read it?) filtering based on URLs isn't just exceedingly dumb, it is now actually counter-productive, perhaps that is one reason such names are being bought.
If you are a religious fanatic and don't want your kids exposed to ANYTHING -- take away their computer. It is a safe bet that the Amish don't have problems like this in their house. Actually you'd lose that bet, there are Amish online. Perhaps the Taliban would be a better example, perhaps not. FWIW, my opposition to this use of expired names has nothing to do with religion.
I have yet to see evidence that pornography in general is "harmful" to anyone. When I was a young kid I stumbled on my dad's Playboys There is considerable research about the effects of pornography on children, much of it negative, much of it available online. Playboy style porn is far from the worst, though I don't think Playboy should market to children either, any more than the tobacco companies. But I guess that should be left to the parents too, every image on TV, movies, video games, comic books, billboards, is the sole responsibility of the parent to monitor? Guess your father's monitoring left a bit to be desired. There are certain images that transcend my ability to properly process them, a horror is left etched on my mind. Examples include the Nazi death camps, the Zapruder freeze frames, the WTC on September 11. Another is a porn site, apparently from an orphanage in what used to be the Soviet Union, of emaciated children, many of them pre-teen, engaged in posed, though real and explicit, sexual acts. If this can sear the mind of an adult one cannot imagine what it might do to a child. Sorry, the internet is not your father's Playboy. -g
|
