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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists at home.

iTunes and Windows Media Player both assume, by default, that every user wants to have a private collection of music. Maybe when my son is 17 that will be the case, but now that he's 10, a shared pool is what we want. Neither of those programs makes managing a shared pool effortless.

Having to log out and log in (dump my son's game on the floor) so my wife can check email is just lame. (Switch users isn't much better)

Laptops today all come with cameras and face recognition technology is pretty good, so in a family situation the system should always know who's sitting in front of it.

And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...

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Having a shared pool for Windows Media Player isn't a big deal at all: on Windows 7, you can store any shared music in /Users/Public/Public Music, and Windows Media Player should index it automatically, or you can add it to the list.

But it's not just shared media, I also want shared metadata including ratings and play counts.

> And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...

Was visiting reddit with a friend on his computer. Autocomplete kicked in at "red". Got uncomfortable there for a few seconds.

This is what incognito mode is for.

Still, Google has SafeSearch, they have some conception of what one might not want to pop up unexpectedly. I know that that particular autocomplete was probably generated from history, but the browser could be more noob-friendly ... everybody starts from ignorance.

IIRC, incognito mode still picks up stuff that was done in the wide open - ie, the scenario from the comment above would still happen if the author went into incognito.

In addition to incognito mode, a "guest" mode that didn't pick up "regular" URL history would be useful for scenarios such as this.

I appreciate that incognito won't give someone my FB cookie, but I don't need them to know what sites I do visit.

I think he meant that his friend should use incognito mode when visiting "red..." site(s) ... Not that he should use incognito mode for his guests.

Android browser seems pretty bad for this. Even if you clear history/cookies/offline files you can still hit the back button and traverse the history that way.

Just put all the MP3 files in a folder with permissions set so that it is visible to all accounts, then use Winamp or VLC with a shared playlist file?

To the browser, unless you have a pre-populated list, the autocomplete URLs are just a list of strings. How should it know if penisland.com is a website that sells pens or otherwise? Also, where do draw the line really? therapistfinder.com? expertsexchange.com?

Google already classifies sites as porn or not-porn. They could make a simple API or data file available and the browsers could use it.

You want to tell google each time you visit a porn site?

(not that they don't know already since the site probably uses google analytics)

I think Bloom filters would allow offline checking, without pinging Google for each request. They already do this for antimalware notices, iirc.

Google developed porn filters during a crisis in 2001. It's a very valuable technology that they're not going to let just anybody share

Autocomplete URLS don't have to be just lists of strings. Many sites already send down metadata to indicate that they are serving up adult content.

That "honor system" approach, coupled with a pre-populated list that gets updated with regular browser updates, could catch the vast majority of embarrassing situations, like the time I found "handcuffedlesbians.com" in the URL bar at a client's site.

> Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists at home.

Really? My iMac was great at it and my Macbook still is. (Fast User Switching from a menu at the top-right.)

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