Comment by vorpalhex
3 days ago
Is there anyone who can't do this today? Adult websites self label, and both your router and ISP offer removing adult websites as an option.
If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.
I don't have any children myself, but as I understand it in the modern age:
Your kid's smartphone can connect to home wifi, mobile data, public wifi, and friends' home wifi - so network filtering alone won't cut it. And 'Encrypted SNI', 'DNS over HTTPS' and Cloudflare makes network filtering much harder than it was 15 years ago.
On top of that, there's loads of porn posted on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and suchlike. So any effective block is going to have a lot of collateral damage.
> On top of that, there's loads of porn posted on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and suchlike. So any effective block is going to have a lot of collateral damage.
The Texas HB 1181 law only applies to websites which have content that is at least 1/3 porn. If Reddit doesn’t qualify for that requirement, then the Texas law doesn’t require ID verification.
There will always people who will arbitrage the gaps between the legal definition of something and the practical application. The blast radius of those kinds of issues always has been huge.
Use a DNS that has porn filtering along with any custom sites you don't want them accessing via the browser. You can even create your own MDM profile to prevent a kid from disabling the private DNS. There are sites that will set this up for you too. Furthermore, use parental controls to prevent installing apps without your permission, use the built-in features to limit screen time, and use tools offered by social media apps to limit usage. A super smart IT wizz kid may eventually figure it out but this will keep most kids from accessing inappropriate stuff.
> If your kid is going to get around that by clever vpn use, age gates don't help.
I think politicians and their supporters believe they do help. Of course from their perspective the only way to know for sure is to implement the restrictions (regardless of whether they succeed, at least they fulfill their campaign promises to their electors of "doing something").
> Adult websites self label
Not social media sites. Sites like Reddit are everything. Some also go out of their way to hide certain information from parents.
Reddit (not to be too picky) does some weird things when a logger is in place, essentially making it impossible to know which subreddit is being accessed.
And that's really where the bad stuff lurks - it's peer to peer interactions.