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Comment by topbanana | Hacker News Reader

This is nothing to do with what he dubs the 'Nanny Tory' initiative.

O2's parental controls is an opt-in whitelist. Only sites like Disney.com etc are allowed. It is presumably intended for when children are left alone with devices like tablets. Seems like a useful service to me.

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When it comes to parents approving such measures, I feel it is mostly an easy way out for them either due to inefficient parenting or extreme insecurity/protectionism.

If the kid is too young and not too knowledgeable about the world then perhaps it would make sense to not be left alone with an -online- tablet. If the kid is older then parents should have by that time invested time and talked with their child and let it know of what dangers may await online.

Finally and with regards to the 'indecent'/'porn' aspect of the filter, if a child is traumatized after viewing a pair of boobs or a vagina then there is something wrong with the upbringing the parents gave to it. Having sexual education websites blocked by the filter makes the matter all the more worst.

> if a child is traumatized after viewing a pair of boobs or a vagina

It's like people on HN have never seen online pornography, which is usually much more than just an unclothed boob. Let's not pretend online pornography is all like this...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Sandro_Bo...

> If the kid is too young and not too knowledgeable about the world then perhaps it would make sense to not be left alone with an -online- tablet. If the kid is older then parents should have by that time invested time and talked with their child and let it know of what dangers may await online.

Sure. http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9cltv/has_anybody_seen_...

Are you honestly that naive?

1. Yeah, so were you traumatized when you first saw a porn flick or beat off to it? How old were you? 18? Come on..

2. There are some really sick people out there I get it. Are you saying that kids should not be told/prepared that such people exist out there and be instructed on how to react when encountering something like this? (e.g. leave the page, call mom etc).

If hardcore pornography and animal abuse are the targets, then how the hell are educational sites getting dragged into the fray?

Because the filters are useless.

You greatly underestimate the breadth and depth of the prudishness that motivates the creation of content filters.

Except we're talking about a variety of filters. The filter in the op is an extreme form of filter that is perhaps useful for a locked down kiosk like environment. (Not as good as doing that properly, obviously) and so that filter is very broad, be because it wants to catch everything and allow owners to whitelist exceptions.

The ukgov porn filter will suffer from some of that, but also the Scunthorpe problem.

Having had blood test results delayed because my surname has the word COCKS In it was frustrating.

The problem is that your children will now grow up thinking that a great firewall is something that those in positions authority normally maintain. How are you going to explain to these children that the Chinese firewall is bad? Would such children have protested SOPA or PIPA?

So really, the question here is not, "Should we protect children?" but rather, "What should we teach children about freedom of speech?"

This is in the context of the uk where we don't have freedom of speech.

It's a useful discussion, but this filter doesn't. Hange the need for it. It does provide some nice examples of why filtering is problematic.

> If the kid is too young and not too knowledgeable about the world then perhaps it would make sense to not be left alone with an -online- tablet.

Why is it okay to revoke internet access entirely, but not selectively? If the argument is that filtering a child's internet is bad parenting, then disabling it ought to be just as bad as limiting it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

This has everything to do with the Nanny Tory initiative! If you read the article, the point he is making is not that Porn is good, or that O2 are censors, but that: UK Parents are failing at parenthood! And that is exactly the condition that the UK Nanny state is expecting to exploit with such initiatives - and any corporation setting up to serve their government masters is part of the problem. The problem, being, that people do not want to be responsible parents and monitor what their children are doing online.

Or maybe it's that parents tried to monitor what their children were doing online, but failed only because asshole marketers refuse to believe that anyone has a right to refuse their spam and were sending graphic pornography to children.

This has not been a problem for a very long time now. We have spam filters and ad blockers -- basically, marketers do not get to show you anything if you do not want them to.

I don't really see what's so useful about giving parents tools to block their children from accessing sites like Childline.

Irrelevant. The point at hand is that the article is completely inaccurate. Whether or not parents should restrict their kids' internet use is a different question entirely.

You should bookmark this so you can come back and laugh at yourself when you have kids of your own.

You do know what Childline is, right? It's a counselling service run by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that deals with child abuse, teenage pregnancy, bullying etc.

As a parent, why would you want to block that?! I know I wouldn't.

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