5,260 karma · joined April 22, 2019
Civil liberties come into play. I can discriminate based on race or sex in who I allow into my house, but not my storefront.
Some place have straight up public accolades requirements - if it’s open to the public, it has to be open to the public.
Your house is your house, but once you establish a venue open to the general public, you have to follow rules.
Roughly they are having difficulty with emotional regulation and processing previous trauma.
They’ve attended treatment camps in the past - which were very positive exercises for them. The approach to the internet at these camps is almost exactly what I am proposing: white lists and immutable history. They have to brew their own software but it’s done. I don’t see why it can’t be offered more widely.
Speaking more broadly, what controls do you think parents should have over adolescent Internet viewing?
Keep in mind most of the really bad stuff is on mixed content domains . Nobody builds a “watch-monkeys-die.com” website. They build a watchMonkeysDie tumblr or subreddit.
My case is not the best example because of the legit mental health concerns. But the principals are the same. As a parent I have decided my child needs granular access to the internet - how does that happen?
It sounds like once the party gets actual influence, its real funding will be determined by the Swedish people.
Doesn’t this make the situation less harmful, or at least fundamentally different from say Elon Musk?
Teachers do not generally monitor computer use during class time. They don’t have the capacity.
Chromebook’s are necessary to complete homework, including during study halls and recess. And at home, of course.
Schools are generally unwilling to create custom rules for individual students - nor are they required to.
I’m dealing with a mentally ill adolescent addicted to very toxic content.
You grew up in an oppressive environment where among other horrible things information restriction was abused.
Both legitimate concerns, and both should be part of the same discussion.
But consider: it was librarian cautioning me about what my child was doing in the library. Not quite kicking my child out, but simply saying we can’t guarantee their safety.
For you the library was a safe space. For my child the library is not - according to the librarian.
I’d like to point out, nobody is saying parents should allow their children to access anything. Especially on the internet.
Are you saying that? I don’t think you are - but you are understandably skeptical of parents moral rectitude.
What tools should a parent whose child is addicted to videos of animal abuse or self harm have at their disposal? And I mean pretending to sleep until mom and dad have gone to bed and watching for 6 hours straight instead of sleeping, for multiple nights in a row. Going 72 hours straight with no sleep to watch people cutting themselves and animals being slaughtered (hypothetical).
I’m simply saying the tools parents have to effectively filter are antiquated and broken.
Also keep in mind the original article is one that discusses removing encryption and adopting some type of state surveillance. Something I am quite opposed to. My proposal is far more permissive, and affects child free grownups not at all.
Thank you for your careful reading of my post, and I am very sorry for the things that happened to you growing up. You’ve come a long way and I respect that.
More broadly your advice is very out of touch with modern life. Don’t let them go to the library? Or summer camp?
How am I supposed to supervise them 24/7?
Every actual expert I’ve spoken to has said “do what you can without driving yourself insane, and understand you’ll fail.” None have advised me to simply “do not give them access to the internet.”
I already forbid it. There are too many damn workarounds (school chromebooks).
Here’s the funny thing - I totally trust my troubled adolescent with devices that log history. Never a problem.
So that, combined with advanced cooperation on parent imposed filters should work fine.
And best part - none of this impacts adults! Don’t turn on immutable history, and don’t turn on white listing! Easy peasy! They can be off by default (and should!) so adults don’t have to do a damn thing!
But after some chats with the librarian, it became clear that wasn’t working. The libraries filtering software wasn’t great (it never is), and some of the books are only appropriate for certain ages.
They didn’t feel comfortable providing additional filters.
What happens then, man? I understand your concern. My current rule with the one is: you can read anything you want as long as it’s paper.
I get some parents are abusive, but I’m very opposed to using “a parent might be abusive” to limit parents discretion- within reason.
When parents are identified as abusive there is a system to mitigate damage. But when that system is never initiated, there needs to be a presumption of parental benevolence.
This will fail some kids. But the alternatives fail more.
Even if they are willing, it’s only for a short time.
The bigger problem is schools. I touched on that with Google Classroom. Lots of schools require devices and rely on third parties like Google Classroom (which is horrible for filtering).
Another problem is family members: grandma and grandpa. Nice people but not tech savvy.
This isn’t an academic study. I’m reporting from the trenches here. And I’m trying to give advice that will make things better, while not encumbering adults.
Previous interventions have failed miserably.
I think the solution is giving parents maximum power: create an immutable record of browsing history - down to the request/response; and, if desired, white listing at ISP account level.
I’ve had to deal with a child seeking out toxic materials - although fortunately not the kind discussed here.
Conventional blocking software fails because the worst parts aren’t bad domains but mixed domains - Reddit, for example.
If you’re going to enact laws, enact laws that require mixed domains to not frustrate blocking software - Reddit does this. If it detects a blocker it throws up a fake subreddit, so you have no idea what your kid tried to access.
Messaging is fairly easy to manage - delete the messaging apps. Also the immutability and white listing would do great things there too.
But when the domain spitting out toxic content is Google Classroom - there’s nothing you can do.
I don’t want to dig on this too hard, but safe harbor rules probably shouldn’t apply when the content comes from or to minors.
The idea behind safe harbor is to effectively route lawsuits to the person who created the content, not to the platform hosting it. But if it’s routing legal liability to a minor who cannot be sued - that doesn’t seem effective.
Also consumer protection laws that require companies that offer child protection features to have some kind of liability if they are merely performative. Many companies will stop offering, which is fine, because a failing system is far worse than no system.
What was the context? Did someone’s child die?
Also the article seems to imply the UK does better at trying rape than the US military. I doubt that.
Allowing minors access to puberty blockers without parental consent is fringe too.
These are both issues amplified by conservatives to discredit liberals.
For a man above 45 the answer is simply, “no.” Very few people understand why. It’s complicated, requires lots of math, and most doctors don’t care.
You trust them or don’t. Take it or leave it. Yes or no.
This was long before COVID.
If you think your doctor has screwed up talk to another doctor or the pharmacist. That’s legit.
But deciding you need a vaccine the guidelines say you don’t is a different matter. That’s just drug seeking.
People close to me have died from cervical cancer, so I’d love to be part of abolishing it. And by following vaccine guidelines that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I encourage everyone else to follow the guidelines too - don’t home brew this shit!
I really wish the left would respond to the rights idiocy with by actually following science. Science like: “not recommended for men over … whatever it is now.”
This doesn’t make you seem like a good person. It makes you seem like you don’t trust public health officials.
I had this conversation with my doc. He said dont get it. Going around that doesn’t make me a good person, it makes me dumb.
Don’t listen to what a forum says. Listen to your doctor.
Much of the hype is focused on functional limitations, where the real payoff is speed.
We can now do some basic - and increasingly more advanced - things much much faster.
For experienced programmers, this isn’t new. It’s a cycle that began with compilers and most recently hit with containerization and cloud computing.
But the public discourse isn’t based around the reality, it’s based around a projected future.
For those with experience, the projected future is a combination of sci-fi and back of the envelope estimates.
Simply not true. It’s questionable what “best program” means for software engineering. It’s a hard craft to teach in classrooms and apprenticeship/mentoring model is reputable. Even if every country had such a system today (far from it) it wouldn’t produce devs with 10 years experience until 10 years from now.
> Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.
Simply not true. Go with the best tool for the job. Favoritism for domestic industries is fatal in highly innovative industries. Even if your own product is better (American Gopher was far superior to European HTTP, American UNIX was superior to Finnish Linux, American Perl was superior to Dutch Python), adoption matters.
Looking backward it seems really bizarre to favor locals, doesn’t it?
The alternative is building the capacity to evaluate and mitigate risk.
A good model is 5g WiFi: trust the foreign dumb parts and provide your own smart parts.
But that requires excellent state capacity. Specifically intelligence sharing with domestic regulators- which many countries struggle with.
At the the end of the day, the processors won’t be designed locally, and trusted computing is quite rare.