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> I'm completely at a loss to come up with a not that difficult way to block porn on the internet in a way that couldn't be circumvented in less than 15 minutes by your average even half way technical teenager.

The easiest way is a password on a computer. If you aren't around to supervise your kid, they aren't allowed to be on the computer. You could also keep the computer in a public location, like the living room or den, where they will be highly unlikely to surf porn.

And I can't imagine there aren't good firewall programs out there for parents to use. There were at least mediocre ones a decade+ ago when most people were still on dial up.

Open wifi networks are still an issue, like I said. Although I'm not sure how many teenagers would surf for porn in Starbucks. Certainly not enough to warrant the censoring of the entire internet.




Get around passwords are trivial in most cases if you have unsupervised access to the computer. The only chance you have is to either lock away the actual computer and only have the screen and keyboard accessible or to epoxy shut the case and fill all the external ports with glue. Again location of the computer is irrelevant unless you never ever leave your teenager home alone. All of this is assuming the kid in question doesn't just buy his own computer, and with decent laptops being less than $400 new and half that (or less) on ebay, that's quite reasonable these days. Plus most phones you can buy today are quite capable of both downloading and viewing porn.

Home web filtering solutions are also joke and snake oil, always have been. They'll stop dim and uninterested people who don't really care too much one way or the other, but anyone willing to spend 5-10 minutes thinking about the problem will waltz around them.

As to open wifi networks, they won't be watching the porn at Starbucks, they'll be downloading it for later viewing.

And finally it doesn't matter how much you do to lock down your computers and networks when they just go over to friends house and use the unlocked and unfiltered computer there.

Again censoring the entire internet is obviously Wrong. But thinking that you can prevent your teenager from viewing porn on the internet if they really wish to do so simply naive.




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