Well I guess I should start by saying that I think that the Communication Decency Act is pretty much useless. Seriously, how hard is it to put a page up before your page that confirms the age of the person about to visit your site. This is something I could make after a few classes of experience in web programming. I guess the only thing easier than this is the ability for a user to bypass this page by putting in a false birth date. I often view trailers on ign.com of video games that are going to be released or are already released and some of them are age restricted. I simply just put two numbers in the for the month and day and type my birth year and I am able to see the content. This is in no way would have been difficult for me to do when I was 11 years old. I certainly think this law was made with the best intentions in mind, but it seems pretty useless to me.
I think web filters do a good job, but at the same time they are just as easy to bypass as the forms where you need to enter your date of birth.
I think the best two ways of filtering content for children are browser filters and computer knowhow on the parent's part. You can choose sites to exclude from a browser, but I am not too familiar with how to do this because I've never needed to do it. I know at my junior high they had software on the computers that flagged you if you entered a certain keyword and you would get in trouble for that. I have never investigated any software like that, but I'm sure one could find it pretty easily. In the end the best method of censoring what your children see is to know what they are doing online. Luckily I'm a computer science major and I spend a lot of time around computers, so I would be able to track my children's internet behavior quite easily. Alas, not everyone can afford to spend as much time around computers as I do and they may not know how to track their children. This could be solved by having classes at local colleges that teach parents how to track what they want to track. Parents can't expect to have legislation come about to make sure their kids are safe on the internet, they need to take some initiative and protect their kids themselves.
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I like what you have to say here Foote. I too agree that parents are the key to Internet censorship, and by that I don’t mean parents trying to push through ridiculous bills, but rather, just keeping an eye on your kids while they are online. Interestingly enough, I agree with this stance when it comes to any form of media, for instance, rather than restricting which words can be said on the radio or what should be shown on TV between the hours of 12 pm and 7 pm parents should just pay attention.
There are some places where restriction should be based not on legislation but rather the type of business you are involved in. For instance, if you are The Disney Channel that markets to kids specifically and you run a website that displays pornography or writes various swear words in all of their documents, than that’s a big NO, and that is where the companies should be reprimanded. The government does not need to restrict sites that aren’t built for children, that is the parent’s job to make sure they don’t go there. Instead, a site should state whether or not it is targeted towards a young audience and then they can have certain restrictions placed upon them. I can’t picture that being very hard to do.
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