How can one keep a clever child from roaming into porn etc.?

sometimes I just want to slap people who do this to children

Why?

My daughter, when she was 12, went to a librarian to ask for a copy of "50 Shades of Gray". So much fuss had been made over this particular book, my daughter was curious. The librarian obliged, and when I went to the library there she was reading it. I told my daughter that I thought she was too young, but I saw no reason to overreact. My daughter wanted to read this, and she knew how to get it. She told me it surprised her how boring it was (which made me chuckle).

Kids are curious, and smart kids will figure out how to access whatever material their little minds decide that they are ready to see. I grew up in the 1980's, and in my early teens I knew how to get salacious material from BBSs. This was a world my parents knew absolutely nothing about. Of course, we were also exchanging magazines as kids have been doing for long before I came along.

I am not very concerned about what my kids find out on their own. I wonder how often parents do more harm than good trying to restrict what their kids can search out.

By fighting their kids natural curiosity and hormones... parents lose the ability to talk to their kids in constructive way when their kids need someone they can turn to for adult guidance.

Smart kids developing computer skills is a good thing.

It's a play on the name of the guy, Christian Grey, and the colour/shade name, which makes more sense to Brits, I guess. My wife and I were slightly taken aback to see that her mother, a widow aged 88, had the DVD of the movie. Apparently it was being passed around the retirement apartments where she lives. Her verdict: "not as good as the book".

There was a British "free education" pioneer, AS Neill, who founded a school in the 1930s with no rules - the kids went to classes only if they wanted to. Rudolf Steiner had similar ideas. Anyhow, at 12 I found a book by Neill in the public library and read it. He said that if a child showed an interest in sex, he would "give him or her Krafft-Ebbing to read". I asked the librarian (who was familiar with me) about this. She looked a bit doubtful, then got the book for me to read, only in the library. It turned out to be a key work in the study of sexual psychopathy, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study), which was first published in 1886. Wikipedia notes that "Psychopathia Sexualis is a forensic reference book for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges. Written in an academic style, its introduction noted that, to discourage lay readers, the author had deliberately chosen a scientific term for the title of the book and that he had written parts of it in Latin for the same purpose." Some of it was, frankly, beyond me at 12, even though I knew a little Latin, but what I did get from it, and I think this was Neill's point, is that human sexuality is something that can be studied and written about scientifically, calmly and level-headedly.

I am making a different argument. The most important factor is whether the child is seeking this material on his own, or if it is being pushed on him. I understand that with the internet, this sometimes gets muddy... but still, I think my distinction is valid.

Doing things that our parents don't know about and wouldn't approve of is a normal part of adolescence. I think we have all done exactly; this is the way we learn about limits and about finding our own way in the world. My daughter's choice of salacious reading material was completely hers. She decided what she wanted to do on her own. She took the initiative on her own. I wouldn't have chosen this for her (which is kind of the point), but it was choice.

If some adult had given her this particular book... or told her to read it. I would be upset and alarmed and possibly violent.

Parents are not omnipotent, kids will push limits and if something feels important to them, they will go there. As kids become teens, having conversations is more important than control.

I explain to my kids what I am worried about, and why I am worried. My daughter certainly knows about privacy on the internet and that I don't want her to meet strangers. She has an online life that is very important to her (and often supportive of her).

The OP on this thread is a 10 year old, there is a very big difference between 10 and 12.

...and you mentioned your 12 year old?

She isn't 12 any more. Kids are funny that way, each year that passes increments their age.

I was just wondering why you seemed to rebuke me for mentioning myself at 12 (and previously 10 in fact) bookishly finding out about sex, on the grounds that the OP's child in question was 10, which the mathematician in me agrees, is different from 12, the age at which you say your daughter read the book called "Fifty Shades of Grey".

Whatever. Brits are always screwing up the spelling of common words.

Do proxies make requests to domain name servers, or does the home computer still make the query to a domain name server and the proxy merely redirect to the desired address?

There are different ways to set this up (and it has been a very long while since I have had to hack around content filtering). If my goal was to skirt around content filtering, I would want to have the proxy server access its own DNS. I am pretty sure that is the usual way to do this... you would have to google to see what the kids today are actually doing.

The more complicated and more secure way to do this (which I have used recently) is to use Tor. This is a proxy that jumps your requests around a few encrypted hops so that no one can see what sites you have visited. The exit node (the system at the last hop) does the DNS query.

I've never used Tor, but I thought they had developed a special "Tor version of Firefox" that is user friendly.

We've had centuries of practice.

It's called Tor Browser.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html

For any ESL readers, Grey here is a proper noun, Christian Grey's surname, and cannot be spelled differently in the UK and USA.

I agree.

And my actual advice is - The Thermohaline conveyer is gerbilled beyond recognition - 200+ Species are extincted daily, Worlds' grain, corn, rice and soy (Poison) Staples can't be planted (Climate).

So - It doesn't matter what you do.
We'll know more by July - But 18 months will be... my guess (That's just surface-dwellers.)
Is that good advice?

We tried to stop/monitor what our daughter was doing on her mothers pc. Sadly there did not seem to be anyway of actually stopping the porn sites. There are links there that will not be recognized by software as porn thus allowing access. In the end I installed a key logger so you could log into it & see exactly what/where etc was being done on the computer. She never knew about that until 1 day we showed her exactly we knew what she was doing! She tried to deny it but she was caught red handed. Take the computer out of his/her room put it somewhere where you can see what its being used for. A pc in the kids room is asking for trouble IMHO!

And folk, actually, wonder why life on Earth is about to vanish...
Personally, and sincerely - Bringing offspring into this world is the epitome of Negligence.

My bet is that there are burn CDs and DVDs that contain the whole tor system including a boot OS making the rounds even at the primary school level thanks to slightly older brothers and sisters.

Given such a disk all they would need to do is to boot the computer in question with the CD and the internet is wide open and no software is going to do any good.

Being a parent now can be challenging to say the least.

if you are on mac, you have . an advantage. But for the same, yuo need to change the Admin Password. let him come to you everytime he needs the laptop password.
in preferences there is a section named "Parental control". Everytime he had to enter any suspicious site, Mac stops him from doing so and asks the admin password to move ahead. All the permitted sites are again listed in the parent control section under preferences. You now have the idea how many sites your son is giving access to be used.

Once more put a boot disk with a linux os disk in the mac and so must for the protection that the mac os will provide you.

An somehow it likely, in my opinion, that such information is likely to being share in the fairly low grades