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Comment by axus | Hacker News Reader

It's very easy to lock up alcohol/cigarettes, a child should never have access. Internet usage is more like broadcast media, a child should have regular access.

The positives and negatives of Internet usage are more extreme than broadcast media but less than alcohol/guns. The majority of people lack the skills to properly censor Internet without hovering over the child's shoulder full-time as you would with a gun. Best you can do is keep their PC near you, but it's not enough.

We agree that a creepy surveillance nanny state is not the solution, but training parents to do the censorship seems unattainable. As we do for guns/alcohol/cigarettes, mass education about the dangers is a good baseline.

EDIT: And some might disagree about never having access to alcohol!

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Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with a parental filter option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a parent through setting up a system if they want something more custom.

If people want to push, they should just push to make these set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And perhaps fund some advertising for these features.

Router parental filters are accountability sinks. They don't actually work, and they can't because we spent the last 20 years redesigning network protocols to prevent middle boxes from tampering with connections.

In what sense? DNS blockers work generally do they not? Adguard also censors google search results.

I don't see why your kid should be browsing reddit.

I mean even only allow whitelisted sites. As I say this can be standardized further.

These measures I truly believe do not need to be 100% foolproof so long as the hurdle is high enough that children give up it's fine. And these measures could potentially notify a parent of a suspected breach or attempt to game it, without intruding too much into the child's privacy.

DNS blockers only work if the device/application is not adversarial or if you also have a smart enough firewall to block DoH, which is designed to blend in with web traffic. Once ECH is widespread, you'd likely need to MitM the device (so you need to install your CA, which is intentionally made very difficult and you might not even be able to do across all apps anymore on mobile devices? At least without enterprise MDM. And as was observed elsewhere[0], apps like spotify can contain a web browser), or perhaps use DNS requests as a trigger to briefly open a default deny outbound firewall.

Things have definitely been converging toward making it impossible for non-corporations to manage the devices they own, the network they run, etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069

This is very interesting thanks.

I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices.

On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate? Are we talking about children or black hats?

The black hats in this case are the software vendors. If your software prevents any ability to inspect any of its traffic (so you can't use external filters), and the OS doesn't offer ways to override/hook into that, and if the inbuilt parental controls are insufficient, you can't do much.

What are you going to do when every application (including web browsers) simply ignores and bypass your DNS filtering "for security" and every site is opaque (e.g. wikipedia looks just like pornhub to your router and every site is using one of a small number of major frontend proxies like cloudflare that's actively specifically working toward traffic opacity)? It happens that every major commercial non-server OS vendor (except Redhat?) is an ad company now, so they all have a reason to block your ability to filter traffic/restrict your configuration to only what they allow. And they're all working toward that.

Good point well made.

This is where Apple, Microsoft and Android need to step up. Indeed they already have in many ways with things being better than they used to be.

There needs to be a strict (as in MDM level) parental control system.

Furthermore there needs to be a "School Mode" which allows the devices to be used educationally but not as a distraction. This would work far better than a ban.

They could provide all the tools in the world. Unless there’s legislation change to what children are allowed to consume legally, everyone will largely ignore it.

Microsoft has done a good job with Microsoft accounts and Microsoft Family Safety. It's about as user-friendly as you'll get outside of Apple, though the speed could be improved. And this only covers PCs, Android 's system is less good.

Even with this, the problem requires more than pushing a button. Time, thought, and adjustment are needed. Like home maintenance, its necessary but not everyone can do it without help.

Getting AI assistance is good advice.

I dunno man. IMHO, kids should not have access to devices of any kind until the brain develops. Im not sure what that number is, but lets say its 15. At that point, we as parents need to be role models and let kids make mistakes. There is this whole idea that if you focus too much on security, you open the door for increased risk. I feel this applies to this situation[0].

When I was a kid, when I reached a certain age, 13 I think, there was nothing my parents good could do to stop me from learning from my own mistakes. I think using blanket laws and tech to curb internet behavior is just going to backfire.

[0]: https://news.clemson.edu/the-safer-you-feel-the-less-safely-...

Ironically, the government that is pushing this only set a drinking age just a couple of years ago (as in the last 10 years). In case you believed this was actually about kids.

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