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Comment by rixthefox | Hacker News Reader

The one question I want to ask these government officials is "Where are the parents?"

If underage children are accessing explicit content, it is the parents, not the websites that are at fault. Why are you handing children devices that are not parental locked to only permit applications that have been approved by the parent?

If the parent fails to properly vet the apps they allow their children to use then it is the parent that needs to be questioned. Pushing this requirement onto websites and services is moving the goal posts. If the parents are too technically inept or unwilling to police their children's devices then they should not be handing them to their children.

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>"Where are the parents?"

Blaming the government for whatever their child does. It seems most parents, they have outsourced the primary education of their kids to the government and tiktok.

I told one such parent that the government is only in charge of educating your child to get a job, not teaching him basic behavior, values and life lessons, and that parent said "no, I pay taxes, I expect the government to teach him everything". Nuff said.

Why is this surprising? It's a society where the government is expected to step in and take care of you at every turn, from birth to death. That's what welfare is for, and free health care, and food stamps, government housing, government education, subsidized early child care, all the way to assisted death.

If the goal is to design a society where the government is responsible for everything, why does the population need to be responsible?

> If the goal is to design a society where the government is responsible for everything, why does the population need to be responsible?

Those people that want that sort of society shouldn't be allowed to do anything without explicit approval from a government-mandated device that tells them every single action that they should do, even breathing.

They want a government that's responsible for everything, then they get to live that idea: If they even do a single action that wasn't told via their device, straight to jail as a 'deviant'.

>The one question I want to ask these government officials is "Where are the parents?"

To be clear, this bill originated outside the government. The Canadian Conservative Party do not currently form the government. They are ideologically-driven religious fundamentalists who don't care "where the parents are". For them it's "porn == bad" and "government oversight == bad except if it's on an issue that my ideology happens to align with".

Don’t get distracted by the red herring. This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about power and control.

It’s _always_ about power and control.

How to say you don't have kids without saying you don't have kids.

Unless you're the perfect kid, did you forgot what you did when you were a kid that you parent didn't agree on?

Kids are full of life and as the saying goes, life finds a way.

> How to say you don't have kids without saying you don't have kids.

> Unless you're the perfect kid, did you forgot what you did when you were a kid that you parent didn't agree on?

But just because child you unwittingly stumbled upon something a child shouldn't see doesn't mean that the website was at fault. Just because you got hurt doesn't always mean that someone should be sued.

Family structure is devolving away from two stable parents, so the state is required to step in.

Internet is getting pretty easy to find access to. We may be past the point where parents can limit their kids to only accessing the internet through devices that the parents control.

It shouldn’t be about limiting access in the first place. The truth is that parents need to have those uncomfortable and direct conversations with their children and help guide them to make healthy decisions.

Where are "proper parental control" implemented?

Conservative "proper parental control" are being implemented.

Attributing blame to parents for anything in 2023, especially their internet or device usage, is incredibly faux pas.

I expect people in 2023 to understand parental controls.

Which parental controls would, say, allow a kid to visit /r/roblox but not /r/nsfw? Best I can tell, Firefox literally does not have any parental controls built in, and they have a note that extensions to provide it are easily bypassed.

It seems reasonable to me to at least start requiring sites and commercial software vendors to build a system that makes parental controls possible. And if a commercial site like reddit is going to have child focused content like a Roblox forum, then it should be easily separated from porn without requiring parents to set up a MITM proxy with complicated filtering rules.

There are simple privacy and (adult) autonomy preserving ways filtering or access control could be done, but after 30 years it still seems to be an impossible task. Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't have a porn theatre in the back where an employee just asks if you're 18 and accepts any 7 year old saying yes.

reddit is a big no no for children. its full of porn, politically charged topics, and predators. you can also use wildcards in a dns sinkhole to target keywords perhaps.

I don't disagree, but also I don't think it's unreasonable that a site like that which also hosts children's forums is going to have parents wanting regulation.

Pornhub doesn't have a part of the website for minor teenagers or Minecraft. Neopets doesn't have a porn or gore section. Even 4chan separates their SFW and NSFW boards onto different sites (though obviously even their SFW boards are not child friendly and don't pretend to be).

You can't do anything at the DNS level for reddit (short of blocking it all) because it's all one site. And it uses TLS, so you'd need to MITM to do partial filtering, which is beyond the capability of most people. I assume Instagram and tiktok are similar/even harder to filter.

Porn sites at least used to ask for credit cards. Now they just ask yes/no are you 18, and they have children's sections. They should really be working to clean up their act in a privacy/autonomy friendly way (e.g. through labeling and partnering with browsers) before they're forced into these kinds of laws. Or stop targeting children as a market and ban anyone that hints that they are under 18.

Some consumer routers may have the ability to filter URLs I think. I'm not really experienced in networking/web technologies. The reddit schema seems easy enough to understand but yeah IG/tiktok, seem impossible. Could you force a particular build of chrome that has extensions baked in for blocking sites/urls? Maybe an endpoint management tool to keep those applications in check. Something like Jamf.

We can't even successfully curtail adverse behavior in the enterprise, with budgetary spends for DLP and communications monitoring measured in the millions.

Parents don't stand a chance. You could be running a fucking kiosk with only Minecraft on it. If it still has an internet connection, kids will be harassed, bullied and solicited.

It's the kids who taught me about the existence and purpose of Finstagram accounts.

The only effective parental control is unplugging them from the internet. But you can't do that, because our lives are inextricable from it now.

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