> > As far as using the Internet as a "babysitter;" it is at least somewhat safer
> > than plopping your children down in front of the TV, with all the safeguard
> > tools available, such as Net Nanny or Cyber Patrol. Parents can have a
> > little more control over it when they aren't there.
>
> Funny that I should be reading this now, considering the tshirt I'm wearing.
> (I posted about this tshirt when I first got it - see link below.)
>
> I don't like internet content filters. The whole idea of them seems wrong. If parents are so worried about what their offspring are going to be seeing on 'net, they should take the time to supervise their kids themselves. It seems odd that people should say "I don't know what a complete stranger might be saying to my child via the 'net, so I'll protect them with a program restricting them to a complete stranger's idea of what's good for my child."
> And that's leaving aside the problem that I think people tend to focus too much on "Look at all the bad sites that get filtered out" and not enough on "Look at all the good sites that get filtered out as well because they made an unfortunate choice of words, or the maker of the program doesn't agree with their politics, or..."
>
> Paul

I have to agree with you here, almost completely. The local schools here are an outstanding example. All computers available to students (except one, but it's a secret ;) have a filter program called Bess, but the teachers' computers don't have it. In virtually every instance, when a teacher found sites that were useful, he or she would reserve a lab only to find that *every* site on the list was blocked for one reason or another.

For example: Every site about Iraq and many about other Middle Eastern nations; every site about terrorism; every site about breast cancer; most college and university home pages; any site. such as email, IRC, commercial sites, or the Dialectizer, with forms and a submit button; sites about John Keats--especially aggravating when I had to do a report on him--; all human rights sites; the list goes on and on. Every student and teacher has stories of frustration at the hands (paws?) of Bess. The teachers hate it, but they've got no say.

Worse yet, the kids who do get into pornography on the internet still do, unhampered. The school also has the computer extremely bogged down with feckless security programs. The kids who made the security "necessary" are the ones who can circumvent it with ease. Which brings me to a point of exasperation:

For fear of viruses, the computer admins tell everyone that they've fixed it so floppy disks can't be used. Thus all attempts by most students to take work home are foiled. Upon hearing this, I immediately began experimenting. Sure enough, every computer still allows the user to copy information or open programs from a disk, but not to save to a disk. How this prevents the spread of viruses beats me. Also, the setup does not prevent a user from copying anything to a disk. I approached the admins with these blatantly obviously problems, but they assured me that I was wrong and disks couldn't be used. After a few fruitless conversations I gave up.

gab"None of which has anything to do with the main topic of the thread, but I'll post that elsewhere."by