Stopping kids form getting adult material.

1. Web cam required for verifying ID and person requesting before granting access - just like being "ID.ed" at the liquor store.

Yep, That's it. K.I.S.S. or then there are loopholes.

Please find the holes in this theory, it is just bugging me every time they get this stuff at such early ages.

No ID requirement is going to be fool proof if a underage person wants something bad enough there going to find a way to get it.
There has always been underage drinking and always will be.
Even with the age requirement for buying tobacco kids are still getting it someone is buying it for them.
As for adult magazines my son had them found them one day cleaning his room I just put them back , also found some sale catalogs out of the mail that showed about as much as thye mens magazines.
How to stop them from getting adult materials who knows. If there was a clear cut way it would have already been solved.

Seanibu, that would also bar all people without web-cams from adult sites which I doubt the industry would agree to.

This maybe a somewhat controversial opinion but why should anyone but the children's parents be responsible for what those children can and can't look at on the internet? There will never be a fool proof way of trying to verify someone looking at an internet site is an adult. The only real way is supervision of the child for the entire time they're using the computer.

Ant

Ant, frankly I am not sure it is realistic to stand over the kids' shoulders every second they are using the computer. Computers are now used for things such as homework, and I don't think it's necessary to be there every second they are doing that. There is, of course, very decent software to block adult sites. It won't filter everything, and if a kid really wants to see something they will, but it does protect children from bumping into something very inappropriate - nowadays, sometimes you accidentally drop a letter from an address of a web site and - presto! - you have a dozen porn pop-ups. I would, of course, urge parents to install blocking software - sometimes those pop-up sites are ones that are not appropriate even for an accidental glance, and those can come up no matter what you do. Sometimes it gets funny -one time in college we were building an internet browser in a .NET class, a professor missed 1 letter in a URL, and suddenly the whole class was treated to an array of porn!

I wasn't allowed to have a computer in my room, it was in the living room. I have a laptop now, but I was in college before I got one. It wasn't that my parents didn't trust me, they didn't trust the pervs out there...

A lot of the kids that do get into trouble online, at least the ones the media choose, have computers in their room because their parents felt they could trust them and wanted to show their children that trust.

and while blocking software is all well and good, most kids can get around the stupid things very easily... and a lot of parents can't figure out how to install it. My parents have no idea how to run the blocking system they have... lol

Toni, I do hear you about difficulty of blocking software. A good friend of mine recently had to go to NY herself to install the software on her mom's computer after finding out some stuff her little sister was looking at; mom was totally clueless. I do also agree with you about not having a computer in the kid's room. Most of my friends with kids have a computer in the study. But what are you going to do? Say - you can only do the homework that requires a computer after I get home? IMHO it's kind of silly. The main rule about computer safety that my friends try to impress upon their children is to never ever ever ever enter any personal information on line.

Good points, I don't however subscribe to the thought "that it is just going to happen." That is let your guard down and then get really smacked to me. Fighting it is the best way to at least have some control.

If there was a way it would have already been... not. That has hardly ever been true with new technologies. People always wait until something is such a HUGE deal before anything is done.

For the sake of argument, I would be glad if there was the stipulation that to buy Adult you have to prove your an adult via a web cam. If you don't have one then tough, can't get it from the web. You will need to go down and buy one from a store. I think thats good - it is not like people aren't allowed to buy on eBay.

Let's say you can't get any Adult material on your computer unless you have a type of flash disc you got from the "Adult store." Or register your IP address with them, well maybe the could all be mandated to have a IP extension that would need to be approved by the computer "owner" and bring up log soft ware each time it is accessed.

My thought is if you sit on you hands you are going to have sore hands eventually. Maybe these aren't the best ways, and I am not much for censorship, but in reality why should it be so "easy." No one figured out that a disease could be cured with out trying. JMT Maybe there is nothing that can be done. Or it is just as simple as a log file being read by parents, or a timer of just how much time was spent in that file that was homework. Who knows, and is innocents really worth fighting for, or is it holding us back - H@ll if I know!

I agree but a lot of things have been put in place to try to help protect kids from these types of things.

There's a distinction to be made between things that accidentally end up being shown to kids and things that the kids are purposefully seeking out. In order to be purposefully seeking things out the child must have a pretty fair idea about what they are doing, just like buying adult material or alcohol from a real shop or getting people to buy it for them - there's not much you're going to be able to do either as the child's parent or the company (be it internet or real life) to stop that child from obtaining whatever it is they trying to get.

And there is always a balance to be struck between how much other people should be doing to protect children and how much the parents need to take responsibility.

Ant

Ptichka said:

Most of my friends with kids have a computer in the study. But what are you going to do? Say - you can only do the homework that requires a computer after I get home? IMHO it's kind of silly.

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Well my parents were always home by the time I got home from school, even before my mom stopped working to be a stay at home mom...

There are always after school programs as well... not all of them require a fee, and the kids are safer there than by themselves... *shrugs* I guess I just like to think that kids should be supervised... lol

The main problem we have to stop this, is the fact that the internet is not owned by one country, and every country has their own way of dealing with it. Different ages for different things (smoking, sex, marriage, alchohol, porn, etc) for different countries... which is why stronger regulation hasn't been inforced (at least according to those that try to regulate the stupid thing)...

Tonichelle said:

There are always after school programs as well... not all of them require a fee, and the kids are safer there than by themselves... *shrugs* I guess I just like to think that kids should be supervised... lol

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I was a latch key kid from the age of 8, and I loved it. While I always liked school, I hated the after school programs. I begged my parents until they finally let me walk home by myself right after school. I guess I just always loved being alone, even though I wasn't even allowed to turn the TV on when my parents weren't around. For safety reasons and everything else I wouldn't have my kid by themselves at the age of 8, but by 12 or 13 I don't see anything wrong with being alone.

First, I think that is more important to stop teens smoking, drinking and doing drugs. The drug problem is the most dangerous problem. I read in the news some days ago that a 16 year old girl died of drug abuse. Very sad. Another problem is that a lot of teens smoke and drink because they think that is cool. So I don't think that nudity on Internet is a major problem, it is a problem but a minor one IMHO.

Gio, I used to think that, and if we were talking about simply nudity or even eroticism I would still agree. Than I got to know a man whose early experiences with port largely colored his sexual experiences for the rest of his life. He was exposed to hard core violent porn around the age of 10, and pretty much grew up with that. This created a lot of psychological problems for him as he matured; it got in the way of normal relationships with women. I am not saying that all young men react to porn this way, I am just saying that it's far from harmless.

Ptichka said:

Gio, I used to think that, and if we were talking about simply nudity or even eroticism I would still agree. Than I got to know a man whose early experiences with port largely colored his sexual experiences for the rest of his life. He was exposed to hard core violent porn around the age of 10, and pretty much grew up with that. This created a lot of psychological problems for him as he matured; it got in the way of normal relationships with women. I am not saying that all young men react to porn this way, I am just saying that it's far from harmless.

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Definitely, I agree with you! Kids have to be protected from porn. But we also know that kids of 13-16 years of age are courious about sexuality. So, maybe they search on internet the explanations that parents and teachers don't give them. The problem is that parents just don't want to talk with their kids about this topic, because they are embarassed.

gio - that doesn't give the child the "right" to go and do it anyway... embarassed or not, a child needs to respect their parents rules...

that's just my very conservative and therefore not so humble opinion

Tonichelle said:

gio - that doesn't give the child the "right" to go and do it.

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Don't get me wrong, I didn't say that they have the "right". I just said what might be the origin of the problem.