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Comment by artumi-richard | Hacker News Reader

As a father of a young child I'm quite keen on being able to provide him with a clean connection to the internet. I want him to be able to explore without having to watch over him.

We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist, and the times various items on it are ok or not ok.

Politicians cannot be blamed for trying to do what is popular, and because we as a community have failed to solve the problem for less technical parents than I, an imperfect solution has been proposed. We should not be surprised.

We are the ones best suited to find the optimal solutions to such problems, and carping on about politicians doing something when we have done far too little is pointless.

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So, why not install one of the many filtering / blocking solutions that exist?

A simple Google search will show you that this is a well explored space, with many different options.

There is relatively easy

https://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls#fam...

But I don't have an easy way to say "No - that site is fine" - I am not in control.

But actually it's easy only because I know what DNS is and can imagine how to setup my router to use their dns servers.

It says you can add whitelists.

"We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist."

We do have blacklists available at the router level. Blacklists at the router level compiled by parents don't work though, for the obvious reason that there are well over 4 billion pages to check. Is a bit like trying to guard what books your children read when they work out about the inter-library lending agreement. I used to cause havoc with that.

The best thing to do is to go on the internet with your kids until you think they have reached a reasonable level of understanding about the world, rather than putting a machine in their bedroom and trusting a filter to work.

The first job is to try and make sure that there is no accidental viewing of stuff. Once a click on a shock site has been made the damage is done.

I could trust a filter based on a whitelist

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ or nothing.

Using OpenDNS as your DNS provider lets you block questionable content.

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