Parents To Block Kids From Joining MySpace 337
Reservoir Hill writes "A New York Times blog notes that attorneys general of 49 states are announcing a partnership with MySpace to fight sexual predators on social networks by letting parents submit the e-mail addresses of their children, so the company can prevent anyone from using that address to set up a profile. MySpace will also set up a 'closed' section for users under age 18 so only their established online friends can visit their pages. MySpace also promises to hire a contractor to identify and delete pornographic images on the site. 'This set of principles is a landmark and milestone because it involves an acknowledgment of the importance of age and identity authentication,' said Connecticut attorney General Richard Blumenthal." Blumenthal also actually said "If we can put a man on the moon..."
Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Informative)
It reminds me of the early days of Hotmail, when they "verified" that you were a US resident by having you enter a matching city and ZIP code. Which just meant that all their overseas users lived in Beverly Hills, 90210.
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Funny)
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I live in Canada and when I was a kid my parents used to get us to write letters to Santa, and they were sent to 1 Candy Cane Lane, North Pole, H0H 0H0.
Back in the day when people wrote letters to santa instead of just calling him [google.com]
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:4, Funny)
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"Why, my little Amy can't use myspace... I've registered mylittlepumpkin@hotmail.com with them. What? No, I don't think mylittlepumpkin1@hotmail.com is her.... mylittlepumpkin2@hotmail.com? Can't be."
Bartender, a round
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:4, Funny)
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...but myspace will be able to say "hey, we are doing our best to stop them".
I'm assuming that I'm one of a million of /.ers that has witnessed this, but this is incredibly common in my arena. There's a safety/security problem in a related facility, so we do something nonsensical but somewhat related. Productivity and morale go down, but we can say we responded to a potential problem proactively. Considering the litigious society we live in, it makes a sick kind of sense. Once you combine a half a dozen facilities all doing the same thing, the issue compounds exponentially.
On
They win by barriers to entry (Score:4, Interesting)
The teenage market is REALLY important to getting a new social technology adopted, and Myspace basically agreed to reduce their service a bit, in return for defacto preventing any competition from targeting them at all.
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You're assuming that the
Pre-teens, teens, and early 20's are by FAR the most fickle consumers. One day everyone is buying brand XYZ jeans for $100 a p
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. This was all about elected politicians getting publicity and paying lip service to make it appear they are doing something about a "problem" that was way overblown by the media to begin with.
Myspace is going along with it because they have to--but the horse and pony show belongs to the state attorney generals, not Myspace.
MySpace is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, I'm 55 and I've had a (unupdated) MySpace page for a couple of years, that alone should make it uncool.
You're right about the publicity and lip service. There is way too much attention paid to the internet, when there are greater dangers close to home. I wrote a journal [slashdot.org] about that very topic last year,
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
My son could bypass any system to verify parental consent easily. However, in my house we practice this apparently rare thing called, 'mutual respect' whereby he doesn't do such things, and I don't invade his privacy. It's all about trust really, and that has to be taught, it can't be either assumed or enforced by stupid schemes like this one.
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
You, on the other hand...
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If we're teaching kids that they don't have a right to privacy, it's no wonder they don't value it as adults. Now I see why there's been so little uproar over Big Daddy Government listening in our phone calls.
Sure, newborns have no right to privacy, couldn't even understand the concept. But the right of privacy doesn't suddenly switch on at 18. It's a continuous function of mat
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:4, Insightful)
But I don't know why you think that kids don't have a right to privacy. If you seriously expect your kids to share everything with you, then you're a moron of the highest degree. If you try to invade what privacy kids attempt to make for themselves (I.E. "tell me what Janie said or you're grounded") then you're setting yourself up for one hell of a rebellion later in their life. It will not be pretty, to think it might turn out all right is naive.
I can understand not wanting your kids to not talk to strangers, but that's better handled by teaching your children not to talk to strangers than attempting to monitor their communication. You can either punish a kid every time they talk to strangers, or you can teach them that bad things can happen because there are bad people out there.
Work with your kids, not against them (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I have every intention of keeping tabs on my son's browsing habits using what ever tools are necessary. I don't intend to spy and attack, but to use it as a tool to better understand my son. I know when I was a ki
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Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
Tell you what -- before I had a computer entirely my own, I was certainly allowed to have a pencil and paper. And I was allowed to keep it in a secret place, if I wanted to. And my parents did not read my various diaries (though there weren't many attempts).
When I went out, I could go pretty much anywhere, I just had to tell them where I was going, and not stay out too late (most of the time). When I got a cell phone, they didn't screen my calls, they didn't have access to my call logs.
My parents apparently did a good job teaching me mutual respect. And the process has nothing to do with the Internet. I suspect this sudden Puritanical paranoia has much more to do with the tendency of people to suspend all reason [rinkworks.com] when it comes to computers.
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they're KIDS. Kids aren't just short adults. They are uncshooled, immature, naive, easily taken advantage of. It's your job as a parent to protect them and nurture and teach them.
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
It doesn't. More and more privacy is granted as the child gets older. An infant has no privacy whatever; a five year old has some, a ten year old has more. You give them privacy (and responsibility) when they need and can handle it.
I just had to tell them where I was going
And as an adult I don't have to tell anybody where I'm going. Your parents obviously did it right - you didn't even realise that your privacy was limited!
-mcgrew
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad it is impossible.
Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, let's just throw up our hands and let the children do anything they want with no limits, responsibility, or guidelines. I mean, they're just going to do it anyway. Right?
If you are a parent, I have to say you're a very bad one. If you're not, don't have kids. We don't need to protect and insulate our kids from the world, we need to educate them and raise them to be aware of what's around them.
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I told my kids (now 12 and 15) what Snort was, I showed them a session once, and told them that I can and will record everything that goes over the network. They're smart and well raised - I'm not worried. I saw a few Playboys when I was 14 - it didn't ruin me. I suspect that I've got less than 15 months before my son discovers youPorn (he's the younger one).
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There's no more time for that! The TV tells me that the internet is trying to fuck my children!
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Just keep telling yourself that.
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You're a sucker... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in your house, you practice this thing called willful ignorance, where by not checking you let yourself believe he's not doing anything.
I used to be a kid, so I know the only way you can know what your kid is up to is to trust, but validate.
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Have some faith, blocking email addresses obviously worked for spam.
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There's an acceptable use policy in our house, documented, which the kids have had explained to them. If they break it, they'll find that there aren't computers available for them use, and they can explain any ensuing school problems themselves. I could, if I wished, enforce the ``only mail accounts permitted are those on the Cyrus server Dad keeps in a datacentre'' at the border by transparently proxying into Squid. But at the moment the AUP
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It's not just the old days. The old workaround of downright lying about where you live still works fine.
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Re:Blocking email addresses? (Score:4, Funny)
(For the ZIP-code challenged, the Zip code is 12345)
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Great idea.. Parents always know their kids emails (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone needs a dose of reality.
Re:Great idea.. Parents always know their kids ema (Score:5, Insightful)
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True, but that doesn't answer the underlying question to this effort, or efforts like this in the future, and that is "How can a parent parent in the internet age?"
Today, both parents work (often by necessity) and have little available time and energy, while kids generally have less supervision, more privacy, mobility, and loads of discretionary income. And that's in a Best Of scenario where single-parent households and troubled kids aren't the
Re:Great idea.. Parents always know their kids ema (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of my e-mail was done with TeleMate over FidoNet. I could plagiarize CD Based encyclopedias and nobody knew the wiser.
It must suck to grow up in the Internet Age.
On a related note, I think sending in your kids' e-mail addresses isn't the worst idea. It would at least keep very you
Re:Great idea.. Parents always know their kids ema (Score:2, Interesting)
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As the parent of two now-grown girls I can tell you that technology has nothing to do with it. Being a parent is an awkward situation.
This is arguably the stupidest thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.
Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
you know, you can apply that answer to MUCH of what is going on with the government, today.
sad but true.
Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ... (Score:5, Funny)
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What these 49 states should be doing (as should the 1 state not participating) is starting a program to educate children and their parents about the risks of social network
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Why not submit your friends' email addresses? Friends don't let friends join myspace!
Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, since when did we place the responsibility on the WEBSITE to prevent an IP address from reaching it? And what about DHCP? What about the next person that gets your IP in a few months? Why can't you filter out access on your own rather than placing the burden of your absurd paranoia on websites that have nothing to do with your ridiculous "my baby gonna get raped" fantasies?
And no, I didn't RTFA. Look at my UID. I'm old school and that's how I roll.
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I mean, think of the children!
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Naturally this of course has nothing to do with the sentencing of rapists, but is just common sense. Denying it in the name of PC will not help the situation.
Contractor paid to search for porn? (Score:5, Funny)
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So, uh... I'll go back to my coding now...
Re:Contractor paid to search for porn? (Score:4, Funny)
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You couldn't pay me to look at MySpace all day... (Score:3, Interesting)
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist. It gets old extremely quickly. And I suspect these people would be looking for things on the same level of seaminess as that.
Only 49 states? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seemingly Texas [chron.com]. (Saying 'agreement to protect young users against sexual predators doesn't go far enough')
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http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/w [wfaa.com]
50th state? (Score:2, Interesting)
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(Sorry, just had to.)
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Canada.
Next Up: theft of Myspace address DB (Score:4, Funny)
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So.. wouldn't this give them an alibi? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Better idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the people that I know who are old enough to have kids on MySpace know a LOT less about using the Internet than their kids do. (Yeah, I know; there will be a few
Any "security" measures designed to "protect" kids don't have a chance of working unless either:
Censorship? Really? (Score:2)
P.S. Don't ask what I think a good environment is. I haven't had kids but I believe it resembles the one I grew up in.
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Re:Censorship? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, we haven't encouraged parents to actually speak to their kids about this stuff for a long time, opting to shield children from anything deemed harmful by anyone.
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We were doing so well at the end of the 90s getting everyone to acknowledge the need for sex education. Then the 'Abstinence Only Education' people started showing up, making a worse mockery out of 'education' than the 'Intelligent Design' people ever dreamed of.
Parents: TALK TO YOUR DAMNED KIDS ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO FUCK THEM! It'll do a whole hell of a lot more to keep them safe than any kind of monitoring software or any absurd volume of legislation.
While easy to get past, this is not a big deal (Score:2, Insightful)
Include internet predator info in sex ed class (Score:2, Insightful)
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Attack tree (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.
For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.
Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".
Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.
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The only real technical hurdle that I can think of that would work would be to block access to MySpace at the entry point of broadband into the house. Naturally, this doesn't stop kids accessing it from their friend's house or from school, work (if they have a casual office job) or anywhere else, but it would stop it happening so much at home.
The much better idea would be monitor, not stop the usage of internet sites. Either tell the kid or do it sil
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By contrast, how many kids have been molested by people they know and trust - in real life? Teachers seem to be one of the biggest risks these days - especially when it comes to female teachers and under-aged (male) students. I can't help but notice that the safety measures they've come up do all of nothing to combat what appear to be more common vectors of predatory involvement.
That's not "predatory involvement" or molestation.
I know people like to joke about that scenario ("ha ha I wish my teacher had done that"), but seriously, there's a huge gulf between a child being molested and a teenager having consensual sex(*): one is a victim, and the other isn't.
But overall you're right. If a kid is going to be victimized, the predator is much more likely to be someone s/he knows and trusts in real life -- a teacher, coach, priest, relative, etc. -- than a stranger s/he met over the in
the parenting solution (Score:2, Insightful)
it's politics (Score:2)
I wouldn't complain to loudly about it; it's far better than if they actually came up with something effective instead.
Cruise Control for parenting (Score:2, Insightful)
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I think that children are growing up too fast these days. Between the media, computers entertainment and fashion we have: 12 year olds dressing like sluts, children desensitised to murder and violence, obesity, inactivity, attention defecit.... the list goes on. I'd rather see kids be kids for alot longer, I'm pretty sure it worked fine for the generations before us.
Personally if/when I have a child I'll be sheilding them from alot of this until
I'm going to go ahead and fix this story (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that story for you. No need to thank me.
This is a good thing. (Score:2, Funny)
Also this way, rather then imposing arbitrary restriction based on age, their is a built in opt out based on a child's actual readiness to dis-regard their parents tech ignorance.
This is potentially groundbreaking! (Score:2)
(Yes, I know, you'd probably need to make a full-scale DDOS out of it so that MySpace can't tell that all the submissions are coming from the same IP address, and it's entirely possible that you'd crash Myspace's servers before successfully submitting all of the possible email addresses at pingable domains. Perhaps a more attainable goal
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
And later, nerds who read news want to create a blacklist to block stupid politicians and law makers from being able to make new laws.
It could be possible at the ISP level (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe as a CEO of a major telecom I could charge an extra $5 a month to firewall sites.
Or I could just charge $5 a month more and have the kids still find free proxies to go around it.
In the meantime a simple fix in the
My way worked (Score:4, Interesting)
She could still get to MySpace if she went to a friend's house, but the inconvenience of doing that made it "not a fun thing."
The blocking by email system is nothing but a feel-good bandaid that does nothing.
Accept no substitutes. (Score:3, Interesting)
In short, over the last 20 years, the interaction between parent and child has significantly degraded in both the quality of communication as well as its duration. As technologies to facilitate virtual socialization advance, their effect on the nuclear family structure will have long-lasting social and cultural effects.
Again, this is not to say that technology is bad, or that the only "true" way to raise a family is to completely sever one's connection to the wired (and wireless) world. It is, however, a wake up call. Is it really necessary to put television screens and DVD players in those minivans and SUVs? Do children really need to be babysat like this in a car? What ever happened to learning how to sit patiently? What ever happened to learning to develop one's imagination? I grew up without these toys; my parents drove me around all the time and I didn't need to be entertained. When it comes to MySpace or the internet in general, the genie's already out of the bottle. These measures are laughable, because it's not merely too little too late--talking about how easily circumvented such measures are is actually irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is, we wouldn't be in this mess if parents actually parented, and kids weren't so addicted to media. Playing email games and spying on one's children is not parenting. Taking the time to learn and understand them is far more effective. But that's easier said than done--corporate America has had us passive consumers in the palm of their hands for quite some time now. They are the ones bringing up today's children, grooming them to be the indentured servants of tomorrow's economy. And to prove my point, I think it's particularly telling that when the "threat level" is raised to "orange" or some other stupid color of the week, signifying that we should all be scared into signing our rights away, the government has the gall to tell us in the very same breath to "continue shopping and act like everything is normal."
This MySpace situation is not about trust or technology. It's really only one small facet of the greater reality that we are living in a society so fueled by rampant consumerism and debt that parents have lost the ability to raise well-adjusted children.
if we can put a man on the moon, (Score:2)
Breed the culture of Fear! (Score:3, Insightful)
They might learn something about the Internet! They might be exposed to the outside world! They might learn something from their experiences! They might compete with the rest of us in the global economy!
FEAR FEAR! Hide your Children away!
Real problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.
Despite shows like "Catch a Predator", 13-15 year old girls who have casual sex with 40 year olds they've talked to for a few hours online don't show up in news articles or in victimization reports-I'm betting they're rare to the point of extinction. More importantly, I SERIOUSLY doubt that 13-15 year olds are inviting strangers they've never talked to over the phone or seen via web cam to their homes for sex. Even the dumbest teen girls seem to have some ability to read body language and facial expressions via video and/or hear tone, inflection over audio. I don't think they're inviting total strangers to their house.
BUT, this is what we've been led to believe. We've been told there's a problem based solely on the existence of demand. We know there's no shortage of adult men willing to engage in casual sex with 13 year old girls, but we haven't been shown that there's even 1 girl willing to reciprocate for every 1000 guys.
Everybody goes nuts over this manufactured problem and take attention away from real victimization-that is young people being sexually abused against their will and without their consent. Real abuse is ignored in favor of virtually non-existent abuse.
Even worse is the fact that any teen girls meeting men online for sex is going of her own free will, whether her consent is informed or not is another issue. It seem that she would bear at least 40% of the blame for anything that happens.
The persons most likely to sexually abuse young people are the same people being constantly implored to monitor their teens every move-parents, step parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, teachers, priests, coaches, neighbors. Strange guy on the internet is somewhere above that guy that works the 7-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 5pm.
Re:Sign up for another address (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sign up for another address (Score:5, Funny)
With an e-mail address like that they're going to be even more surprised to find out that their 12-year-old daughter is actually a lonely 40-year-old man.
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