Plusnet's failure to protect children from online porn

[#1]

Teenagers have access to a wealth of proxy web servers.
How else are they to use school computers to access youtube, whatisface and tweetersphere etc?

[#2]

Quote from: purleigh

Out of interest, what IP address would you use to access 'youtube' ?

You can use any as they are using multiple servers but you will not hit youtube as you need to pass the domain name. If a server is hosting multiple domains using the IP address will fail.

[#3]

Having a look, to change network settings requires an Admin password on Windows 7 so maybe changing the DNS settings there isn't as easy as I thought, might be possible to do it via the command line but I don't want to play around with that myself and break everything just to experiment (too lazy to fix things when they go wrong).
As stated above, it is possible to get a router with built in parental controls, but as far as I know they work on a few principles, first you have a blacklist of known sites which contain adult content, if the site isn't in the blacklist then it should go on to looking for keywords in the meta description tag, having certain keywords there may be a bit of a trigger (but may also block you from looking at motorbike modifications for "naked mods"), some may also have a content rating meta tag.  Some sites though will fall through (naturally), there is no perfect automated system to protect kids from looking at adult content, just the mechanical one of watching them (100% safe that one).
With 18 games, aye, it's a nightmare, you hear stories of a 12 year old kid at the store with their parents saying "buy me GTA IV!!" and the parents oblige (could explain why I got Fallout 3 from a charity shop for £2 though...), if parents were to be educated that buying a 12 year old a game that is rated 18 is a bit like buying them a porn movie/booze/ciggies then maybe they would say "heck no" rather than giving them a game where you beat up people with a baseball bat or hire ladies of ill repute for professional services rendered.
Finally, no matter how locked down a PC, if you have it in an area where you can't watch it, kids will (some will) watch adult content, it'll be "omg you want to watch what I saw on this website last night! - I can't, parental controls - np, I'll download it onto a USB stick for you tomorrow - SWEET!" or something like that.

[#4]

Monitoring children the old fashioned way is the only truly effective way.  Kids will find a way around anything these days.  There's a wealth of information out here on the internet so sooner or later they'll stumble across it.
Pulling out the network cable when loading group policy at school always did the trick for me back then.  The majority of people spent time looking up proxies though.  There's nearly always away around something and kids will find it.

ISP's shouldn't be responsible for restricting material.  Parents need to start taking responsibility for looking after their own children and monitoring what they do.  The "someone else will do it" is a bit ridiculous.

[#5]

There are some interesting points, and follow-up comments, made in this BBC news article - Could teenagers be stopped from looking at porn?

[#6]

Another   article from the Telegraph pointing up the problems.

[#7]

and some more - Online pornography: What can be done to protect children?

[#8]

Quote from: purleigh

[quote=walker23]I assume that DNS based services can be bypassed if IP addresses are known?

While that is true, why would any responsible parent allow their children's computer login to have administrator privileges - which would be required to alter the network settings.

There's quite a lot of software around that *only* runs from an account with Admin privileges.  I tried denying admin privileges to my kids to start with but it is not workable in practice.
As regards to the original point I agree with the concensus here in that it is not the job of the ISP to censor.  I strongly believe in educating kids so that they can be responsible for making their own decisions.  When they are younger they use the PC in the lounge and, when they get older, they have more freedom.

[#9]

Quote from: purleigh

There are some interesting points, and follow-up comments, made in this BBC news article - Could teenagers be stopped from looking at porn?

Quote from: The

Firstly there are things like encryption, which online banking uses, which means the network provider can't tell people are talking to their banks, let alone what they are saying.

That's incorrect, yes the network provider can tell that people are talking to their banks, but can't tell what they are saying.

[#10]

Unless they are using a VPN.
[edit]
Or using Usenet, bit torrent, irc, skype etc etc
[/edit]

[#11]

I personally don't want my internet censored
BUT
These days you can connect to the internet through a computer or a tablet or a phone or a games station or a TV set.  You cannot get parental control software for all of these devices and if you know what you are doing it is easy to change the DNS server to avoid OpenDNS (and change it back again afterwards).  Therefore if you want to restrict what your children can access this has to be done through your ISPs - both of them if you use both mobile and landline/cable internet. 

[#12]

Hotspots?
I can connect to several neighbours connections because of BTFon.

[#13]

Thing is though, even if filters worked, i.e, say they:

• Couldn't be easily worked around.


• Couldn't be easily avoided by a site which wants to avoid them.


• Caught 100% of all porn sites.

It's not as if porn is the only thing children need protecting from. What about all the (potential) nutters you get on chat? So you name a chat method be it Facebook, Twitter, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, etc. and they should all be banned too.
Though it is typical of the government to pretend it is the only thing though. One day they may have someone in parliament who knows something about IT.
Must go another pig has flown past the window.

[#14]

Quote from: ReedRichards

... if you want to restrict what your children can access this has to be done through your ISPs - both of them if you use both mobile and landline/cable internet.

Not just your ISPs but those of all the free WiFi hotspots dotted about (and the computers at school / college and so on).
The problem with making all ISPs responsible for blocking inappropriate content is how to define inappropriate.
It will make the "VAT on food above the ambient temperature" muddle seem like a picnic.
If you install parental control software on your PCs, you will soon experience the problem first hand (as I have done).
The person, department, company, etc. deciding what is inappropriate will have different ideas to you as a parent.
There is no one size fits all internet filter.
However, you may be aware that the internet is already filtered by many UK ISPs.  When you visit a website, the address is checked by the ISP against a database of dodgy websites and if it is well dodgy, you are logged (and maybe blocked).  Visit too many and you could get a visit. See the Internet Watch Foundation http://www.iwf.org.uk/services/blocking/iwf-list-recipients

[#15]

There was a short thread, a few weeks back, regarding a Plusnet customer being censored by the IWF filter - http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,102621.0.html
and another - http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,93167.0.html
Not happy bunnies