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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

When I think back to when I was a kid, getting around school internet filters and helping my friends remove parental controls from their devices, I can't help but think the Streisand Effect was hard at work in my brain. The adults was determined that I wouldn't see a thing so I was determined to see it because what could they be hiding?

Now approaching the age where the thought of having a family and kids is on my mind more and more, I always wonder how I will approach this problem. I can't think I would do it any differently than you. For young children sure, throw up DNS filtering at the router level and the kiddos' will be none the wiser. But if my future kid ever turns out like me, that will probably only work until 7 or 8 (when I figured out how routers worked), at that point I would think it has to be an honest conversation about all the crap on the internet. Even when I was a kid I knew when the adults were feeding me a load of crap.

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What do you think schools should do? I teach at a school (K-12), and there's definitely circumvention of technical controls at the high school level. But I can't help but think we're a whole better off because of the filtering.

DNS filtering (pi-hole is great here), scheduled vLAN time of use shutoffs (no after school shenanigans), obvious blacklists and ip request logging + pop-up warning are probably good enough for 95% of kids.

We use Meraki (huge wireless deployment, so it makes a lot of sense to just use their gateway and call it good) with their blacklists. Biggest problem is it considers too many things "gaming" and needs exceptions-- e.g. lichess and chess.com are OK. Authentication and logging are pretty good.

Rateshaping students to have enough bandwidth to do schoolwork but not to have wonderful connectivity (campus has a 2gbps symmetric connection, but we only give students 4-5 megabits/sec over wifi most places on campus) is also a part of the picture.

Whitelists. It's kind of a pain, but might help reign in the teachers that send kids everywhere on the internet without much thought about the surveillance dangers.

MS and HS students are expected to be able to independently browse the internet to do research-- this doesn't work with whitelisting. (And in elementary, there's good human supervision of technology use).

This, not to mention it seems somewhat unproductive to lock off 99% of the internet because of information collection instead of teaching how to defeat those collectors. The kid's going to grow up and leave eventually and will have to contend with the full internet, it doesn't feel like a good idea to leave them without any experience of the kind of things you can run in to.

Kids don't get any "experience" contending with surveillance. It is all done behind your back, on purpose. Results are never deleted.

Certainly schools are not even attempting to teach countermeasures. They tend to dabble in the "be aware of bullying and self-esteem" issues, but are completely outmatched in the security arena. Ignore at your peril.

We, at least, spend a fair bit of time on:

- Advertising and dark patterns

- What else can be inferred about you from seemingly innocuous information, and potential misuse

- Durability of your digital footprint

- Security, file types, etc.

Education doesn't fix these issues, though. Even well-educated developers would often give up and click 'Allow' on a modal privilege escalation box that pops up repeatedly in research. And if I need to get something done and it doesn't work I'm pretty quick to re-enable scripts and tracking.

Knowing these thing exist is a great first step, and glad to hear you are helping out.

But, it doesn't become a concrete, visceral thing until you inspect a no-script menu while browsing a news site. Or run Little Snitch on a freshly unboxed Mac. Or going to a "white pages" site and see the last four addresses of your family members. Salary info, current whereabouts, criminal history, are a fee away.

It's a different world.

Yes, but the whole world won't be developers. And many in the know just don't care.

You're talking about a population of 12 to 18 year olds. Even among the most responsible and least-easily influenced of them, social pressures absolutely dwarf any abstract concerns about corporations knowing a bit more about broke-ass you to try and sell you things.

Most of this population will take a short term gain for an uncertain consequence a few minutes later. You're talking about short term gain versus consequences that they may view as inevitable and occurring decades away.

I can only affect my kingdom, what others do is mostly not my concern. Reminds me of the corporate garbage “food” products most people consume. I speak out but not going to steal their doritos.

You're the dude who spoke of the need to "reign" in teachers and advocated for restrictive whitelists.

I did and would do it again.

These are exactly the population that should be protected. If you wanted to give them agency, which I support, let them manage their own whitelists instead of throwing up hands in defeat.

The future is already here, trends are not reversing:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-09/column-tra...

We can teach them to protect themselves, pretend the problem doesn't exist, or say "aww shucks, all the cool people are being violated."

Then they will probably use their Data Plan if they have one to get around it.

You're obligated to block, because you're responsible for giving it to them and you have to deal with the population as a whole. I based my decisions on my kid's temperament. You don't have that luxury.

It doesn't mean you'll be in any way effective.

By the same token, we block this kind of traffic at work...all it ended up doing was pushing the negative traffic to employee's cellphones. Which is fine, because it makes the office network safer.

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