Website age ratings 'an option'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7800846.stm

Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.

Can anyone spot the obvious flaw in this suggestion?

[Callumpy]

hmmmm, what a stupid idea. Also, how would they know what the age of the person viewing is?

apart from the fact it will not work without accompanying software tying a user to an age limit it will attract none restricted persons to the site

[rogerdraig]

i think if you dig you will find the idea is for sites to get this rating and for isp to provide a service or services that would only allow rated sites to be used on it

whether this is a good idea i dont know but it would sort of work like that

this is the only bit i could find on it now lol

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081227/...s-45dbed5.html

i read a whole article on it some where yesterday but due to accidently swollowing a whole bottle of red i can remember if it was on here or in a magazine

[Horace]

Originally Posted by BBC

Mr Burnham, a father of three young children, believes internet-service providers should offer child-friendly web access.

The guy is obviously completely clueless.

[rogerdraig]

i wouldnt say that its just the majority dont understand how the net works

[downquark1]

Originally Posted by rogermevans

i wouldnt say that its just the majority dont understand how the net works

[rogerdraig]

lol

[Stuart]

From the BBC article..

Concerns over children's safety on the internet have already led to calls from the NSPCC for computer manufacturers and retailers to install security to stop children finding violent or sexual content.

I'm sorry, I fail to understand why the parents can not take responsibilty for monitoring what their children are viewing. I personally don't believe that children should be given unsupervised access to the Internet (actually for the reasons outlined by the NSPCC) but I don't believe installing software (which may or may not be accurate, up to date or easy to bypass) is the correct answer.

[the_neurotic_cat]

I like the idea of having 'an internet' as opposed to 'the internet' which would have it's own packet switching protocol which would make a users real-world identity a far more integrated facet into the basic function of the information transfer. With far more powerful computers and higher bandwidth than was envisioned when TCP was developed i think we can afford a far larger overhead in the datapackets.

We can't stop abuse but we can make it more difficult for a while. But of coarse, nothing can really beat having the computer in the living room and only allowing your kids on it when your there. But even that is unreliable.

I'm sympathetic to the desire to have a safer info tool. I am sometimes filled with dread with what my little boy might see one day, especially in the future when the internet becomes a completely socially integrated communications tool.

Stuart thats all well and good for you and me and many others on this forum who know what we are doing but there are 10's of thousands of parents that simply do not have a clue how the net works much less be able to install and setup parental control software. I always setup parental control software on my kids pc's and block content i am not happy with them viewing and even on here i have been told i am a lousy parent for doing that so it is a bit of a can't win situation for parents.

I would welcome some sort of scheme where i could simply enter the ip address of my kids pc's along with their age and the isp has software in place to prevent them viewing which if done that way any parent with a little guide would be able to do as well. It is a good idea but as always the measure of this is in the implementation and enforcement and if past initiatives are anything to go by once this loses it's media value the idea will just be quietly forgotten.

[rogerdraig]

Originally Posted by Stuart C

From the BBC article..


I'm sorry, I fail to understand why the parents can not take responsibilty for monitoring what their children are viewing. I personally don't believe that children should be given unsupervised access to the Internet (actually for the reasons outlined by the NSPCC) but I don't believe installing software (which may or may not be accurate, up to date or easy to bypass) is the correct answer.

i do take cotrol over what they do on there BUT its not as simple as it seems i have two kids and often my nieces and nephew here using my computers watching all 4 and the diferent levels they need can be trying and no software i have seen is perfect to much protection and i spend a whole lot of time allowing stuff for home work to little protecton means sitting with them all the time

most parents are still completely at see on how to use the software or how to block unblock things themselves

i might if it was posible pay to have a seperate servive that would only allow rated ( via say the film rating body ) for the kids

though if it was posible i think it would be better run as a free extra service as i doubt at least to start of with it would require much band width

other than for kids i am completely against any censorship other than the removal of child porn and maybe anything to do with animals and that can be done on a as it comes up basis especialy if there was a service aimed at kids

lol maybe there will be a use for phorm after all ( yes i know its not quite what it does )

and its better than the water shed idea ( i guess those who thought of that one didnt travel much )

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

Stuart thats all well and good for you and me and many others on this forum who know what we are doing but there are 10's of thousands of parents that simply do not have a clue how the net works much less be able to install and setup parental control software. I always setup parental control software on my kids pc's and block content i am not happy with them viewing and even on here i have been told i am a lousy parent for doing that so it is a bit of a can't win situation for parents.

I would welcome some sort of scheme where i could simply enter the ip address of my kids pc's along with their age and the isp has software in place to prevent them viewing which if done that way any parent with a little guide would be able to do as well. It is a good idea but as always the measure of this is in the implementation and enforcement and if past initiatives are anything to go by once this loses it's media value the idea will just be quietly forgotten.

how many kids you know have there own IP address?

A simple user account control update (would require an update from MSHQ) could be implemented to block any sites that they are not old enough for . I see no other way for this to be effective

[rogerdraig]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

how many kids you know have there own IP address?

A simple user account control update (would require an update from MSHQ) could be implemented to block any sites that they are not old enough for . I see no other way for this to be effective

i would say none at the moment but as they can provide them for businesses then it is possible

no idea if its going to be cheap and easy but as i said i would pay extra to have a little more ease leaving them on their own for a bit lol then i will only have their chat logs to check

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

Stuart thats all well and good for you and me and many others on this forum who know what we are doing but there are 10's of thousands of parents that simply do not have a clue how the net works much less be able to install and setup parental control software. I always setup parental control software on my kids pc's and block content i am not happy with them viewing and even on here i have been told i am a lousy parent for doing that so it is a bit of a can't win situation for parents.

I personally wouldn't call someone a bad parent for limiting what their kids can see on the Internet. A lot of it is not suitable.

And the parental control software that parents apparently can't set up is exactly what the NSPCC is proposing as I understand it..

I would welcome some sort of scheme where i could simply enter the ip address of my kids pc's along with their age and the isp has software in place to prevent them viewing which if done that way any parent with a little guide would be able to do as well. It is a good idea but as always the measure of this is in the implementation and enforcement and if past initiatives are anything to go by once this loses it's media value the idea will just be quietly forgotten.

Due to the way routers work, it would be impossible to have a scheme that enabled people to enter an IP and have the ISP block access to sites from that IP. They could insist that you use a seperate phone line, or give out/sell routers configured for such blocking (some can do this). In this case, the ISP would not be blocking access, your router would.

The ISP could distribute routers that would download a list of known bad sites from time to time and make it easy for users to set their own router to block access to the sites on that list from one or all of the devices connected to that router (I say devices because I am counting other devices that can browse the web via WiFi such as Mobile Phones, the Wii and the PS3 as well as PCs/Macs).

There are a couple of problems with that approach:

1) Most routers have limited memory, although they should have a few meg free, which would be enough space to list a few tens of thousands of URLs. Not a lot when you consider that there are probably hundreds of millions of sites though.

2) Such lists are difficult to keep up to date. You may block a site, but it's possible that the kids will find the same images on any one of a thousand other web or forum sites. They may also be cached by a caching service, such as google.

My problem isn't so much the blocking of sites (there is a lot of stuff on the internet that I am not sure anyone should see let alone children), but that they are suggesting technological solutions that may not work well, but will be used by some parents as a substitute to actually monitoring what their kids are doing, because they believe that the blocking software will block any dodgy sites.