Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and today I have sitting next to me Jonathan Strickland, one of our writers. I suppose I should remove the tape. Yeah, well, I was gonna make a great owl sound, but I don't even actually have tape. Those That was radio magic or podcast magic if you want podcast magic. Well, the reason Jonathan sounded muffled up front was because we were talking today about parental controls. Yes, although I'm not his parents. No, No, let's clear that up right away. No, he is not my long last father. My father is is is neither long nor lost. He doesn't have to wear a big black suit with a mask over his head and wields a lightsaber not often, Okay, alright, So anyway, parental controls are a subject of much debate simply because you know, let's get down in the nitty gradie. It's a form of censorship um about which many people, including Jonathan uh and I'm probably not gonna sound like, you know, an anti censorship person. But I also have two young daughters, one of which is uh too young to do any more than drool on the keyboard. But you know, recently I have a kindergartener who's very computer savvy, and uh started thinking about that the other day. Looked at the mac os and there's a parental control suite built into the operating system. Yes, just like there is for a for Microsoft Vista, and uh, these are these are really simple uh solutions. You know. It says turn off the computer at a certain time on school nights, or only allow them to use the computer for and then you get it to set half an hour, whole hour, three hours, and you get to pick So those kinds of things really okay, not censorship, but you do have some control over how much time your your child spends using the computer. Um, and they're built right into the operating systems, which you know, seem pretty cool. Now. They also go farther. You can allow them to block uh dirty words in the nictionary websites that might be offensive. Of course you're relying on somebody else to set those sites up, you know, and say, well, um, go ahead, and subscribe to these conventions, so you're sort of trusting somebody else to block your your websites for you. But um, you know that that's essentially how it works. And I thought, well, you know, I would like to limit my my kids time on the computer, so I set up a basic set of parental controls. UM. So I'm so far pretty happy with it. Cool cool, Yeah, back when, uh, back when I was a kid, UM, I was fortunate to be part of a LUs hold that had computers pretty early on. So I mean even when I was I guess about maybe twelve or thirteen, we had a computer. This is kind of dating myself a little bit, um, but we had, uh, the first real computer computer that we had. I'm not going to count the Texas instruments and please don't send me mad email about that, but it was the Apple to E, the Apple to me, and and we had an Apple to E. We had several games on it, um, which ostensibly were for me, but it was not unusual to find that my father playing playing games and beating my high scores. Um. But the the real reason we got it was because my my father writes novels. So um, our parental control system was dad coming into the office and kicking me off the computer so that he could write the next chapter of his book, which was you know necessary because in order to supplement his income and pay for my education and everything along those lines and those of my sister, you know, he kind of had to. So that was the old style of rental control where it was very much hands on. But yeah, today, when you've got kids who have their own computers now or their own phone lines, I mean you've got a lot more technology available, and some of it geared specifically towards children. Um, you really have to take these other things into consideration. It's not like, you know, we can only afford one machine for the entire house now. Um, you know, the prices have dropped so much that it's not a luxury item anymore. Um, not for a lot of families anyways. For some families, yes it still is. But for many families, you know, it's not unusual to find three or four computers in the household. So in that case, you can't really just you know what, pop your head in every five minutes and make sure that your kids not jumping back online to to check out the internet. It's it's not really practical. So and I can I can begrudgingly agree that these are unnecessary. Uh has died to use the word eve, But they are necessary um in many cases. Uh yeah, well see they they actually hurt me a little bit. Yeah, I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. Of course, parental controls don't go only, they don't stop at the edge of your computer screen. There are also other, many other screens that you'll find parental controls on, like your TV, the beachip which is built in actually to the TV itself, which is supposed to UM allow the rating system to sort of help you control what can and can't be seen. Um. But you know, you'll also find it on a lot of set top boxes, like a cable or satellite subscriber. You'll um in many cases find that there's some way to knock out certain channels. Uh. Personally, I like doing that with the shopping channels. So yeah, I put a little password in there because I, you know, I don't really want to watch them. Um. Well, and and really technology has become so pervasive that it's it's that's pretty much why you need these things. So kind of let's let's go back to the computer one for a bit, because I did write an article that that that dovetail tails into this conversation. UM. It's not directly relevant, but UM tangentially, I suppose, which was about Internet censorship and UM. One of the big problems are that that advocacy groups have, with privacy advocacy groups and and and UM and free speech advocacy groups have with these kind of UH solutions is that they're not the most elegant or accurate UM ways to prevent people from seeing certain sites. A lot of them depend on UM blacklists. So in that case, like Chris was saying earlier, you're depending on someone else saying this site is inappropriate for people to look at at work or for children to have access to UM. And so that's just a list of websites that that someone else somewhere has determined are not appropriate for you or your your kids to look at. But in other cases they use keyword blocking, so it's kind of like a search engine. You know. Search engines will often UH scour a website and and categorize it by the keywords that are on there. So when you do a search for that keyword term, that's how they pop up well, the same sort of thing for these parental controls. They search for a database of keywords, and if those keywords show up or phrases in some cases UM, that site will automatically get blocked by the software. And the problem is that it doesn't always block the appropriate site. Sometimes it blocks stuff that really you should have access to. UM. I have a I have friends who work at the Center for Disease Control and some of them work in uh in realms which require them to do research on things like sexually transmitted diseases. But with certain software blocking applications on their are website blocking applications, they can't go to the sites they need to go to to do research because they these keywords are popping up and that the information is being blocked. So there are times where this can really prevent you from from even doing your job right. So that's kind of uh that's that's why I look at this is sort of a downside in many ways. Now, when you're talking about kids, it's a different it's a different matter altogether. But the problem is that these these parental controls aren't being applied just by parents too kids. They're being applied by by companies to employees or in some cases by governments to citizens. True enough, there are instances even of I s p s Internet service providers who are filtering content that comes into UH into homes based on their content for you know, actually have heard of politic coal content being censored. UM. And we're just talking about in the United States. Of course, there are other places like China who are famous where you know, they're famous for blocking large, large volumes of content on the Internet, and Cuba, which has its own intranet which acts like an Internet but is really all self contained. It doesn't really access anything to the outside, so it really insulates the citizens. That's true. It's one of those things to UH that people try to use it for uh. You know, applications such as libraries, public libraries where um you know, in this case, you wanted to shut down at a certain point to uh to log off all the computers in the library. But um, you know, there is a big debate in many library circles UM over whether or not it is a good idea or a bad idea to UH to allow censorship. Of course, you don't want uh. Your child is working on a term paper, UM for a class, you don't want somebody surfing the internet for for porn right next to them. But at the same time, you know, is it right? You know, one of the central tenants to UH to the American Library Association's uh you know code is that you're supposed to open these channels and and fight censorship and all fronts. I know this because I'm pursuing my degree in library and information sciences. So this is a topic We've talked about a lot lately, but um, it is. It is one of those things where they you know, there are people fighting on both sides of it. They see a reason for it. But you know, for as far as the kids are concerned, but as far as adults are concerned, do you apply the same rules and in what way? Right? It's difficult? Yeah? Yeah. Do you put a do you have a separate section in the library? I mean, and if actually does that, does that is that inappropriate in the way because it casts a certain light on the people who go in there. One of the one of the most popular ways of handling it is to notify the library customer that they are being they are not using a filtered internet connection, and to offer an unfiltered internet connection to that person, you know, as an alternative, it's like, well, here it is. You know. Of course they also risk losing federal funding for these projects because that's part of the legislation. And and this is you know, it's just gonna get more complicated. It's not gonna get uh easy. You know, it's not gonna there there's no easy answers to this, and it's not gonna you know, there's no solutions gonna pop up in the next thirty seconds or something. I mean, you're hearing the latest news I've heard about. This is for airlines that are considering, you know that they're starting to use um, I'm starting to WiFi enable right in flight Internet that have WiFi enabled uh um in flight services, so you pay to have access to the internet and you can surf the web on your laptop in flight for a fee. UM. And there are people they're both customers. There are airline personnel like like flight attendants and even pilots who are all concerned about whether or not they should put in filters to block people from surfing for porn on an airplane flight. Right, And I mean that that's definitely one of those situations where you're you're thinking, really, why would you want to You're sitting next to perfect strangers. And I've heard arguments about this. I've heard arguments that say, well, why would you look on someone else's screen? Well, it's in your field of vision. I mean, you know, I don't know about you, but my my vision does extend beyond directly straight in front of me, and the way the way you're sitting in an airplane. Let mean, if you're in coach, I mean you know, you're your elbows are and sticking in the ribs of the person next to you. There's not a whole lot of space there. Well, if you think about it. The one of the biggest arguments that I've heard for people who do not want airlines to allow cell phone use is they don't want to hear everybody else talking. No, I don't having their personal phone conversations. Well, why would you want to? You know, I'll give that some credit. You know, you're a captive audience for your four hour flight. You have to sit next to this person in very close proximity. If you don't want to flight, you can't switch seats or anything like. Yeah, So, I mean I don't really want to watch somebody sir, for porn, you know, sitting right next to them and coach and I want to but no, particularly not when you're a captive audience strapped into a seat at thirty thou feet that that definitely does not have appeal to me. And I've heard suggestions, perhaps tongue in cheek for solutions like having the curtained off area in the back of the plane so you can just have the porn section. And just do we really need to turn airplanes into that kind of environment. I mean, we used to have the smoking sections, which, depending on your point of view, we're bad enough. From my own point of view, definitely bad enough, so I'm glad those are gone. But I mean, it's just such a kin of worms um and and even though I am vehemently anti censorship, I guess it's one of those things where it's okay as long as it doesn't impact me, because I can I can definitely say that if I were sitting next to someone and they were looking at inappropriate material, however you may define that, it would definitely make me uncomfortable. And I mean it just seems wildly inappropriate. You you you would hope people would use their individual judgment and come to the conclusion of, hey, this is something I should only look at in the privacy of my own home, bathroom, closet, whatever, um, and not on a seven thirty seven going on a transatlantic flight. You know. But you can't necessarily trust that people will do that. So that's where the kind of worms comes in. And that's what I think I'm going to have to do eventually with my kids. Um. You know, they're, at least as far as I can tell, um, you know, pretty smart kids, and they're gonna have to you know, they're gonna be able to get around a lot of the paroun controls I could set up for them. You know, they'll find some way to do it, because you know that's the kids are smart and uh you know, and they soak up information so quickly, see as fast as we come put up barriers that are gonna know ways around them. It's kind of it's it's both admirable and scary. Yes it is. And you know, I think I think you're right. I think what it comes down to is educating people and saying, look, you know this isn't appropriate at this time. You don't want to do this in front of all these people. You don't want to expose people to things that you wouldn't want to be exposed to, and here's why. And you have to uh to get in there and explain what it is, what's going on, and say, you know, you're gonna have to use your judgment. Yeah, so we're getting back to the old parental control. Exactly interesting, right, You can't just solely depend upon technology. Although technology can certainly help you out, you can't. You can't depend on that as the the cure all solution. Um. Yeah, and you've got to hope that we don't have too many Andy Kaufman's out there, because those are the exactly the kind of people who would want to push your buttons and do what you're not supposed to do in public just to see how people react. And there's always going to be those people, but hopefully they'll be in the minority. Well. I guess that about wraps up this discussion. If you want to learn more, you can read all about internet censorship on how stuff Works dot Com right now, and we'll talk to you again soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com? Let us know what you think, Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and today I have sitting next to me Jonathan Strickland, one of our writers. I suppose I should remove the tape. Yeah, well, I was gonna make a great owl sound, but I don't even actually have tape. Those That was radio magic or podcast magic if you want podcast magic. Well, the reason Jonathan sounded muffled up front was because we were talking today about parental controls. Yes, although I'm not his parents. No, No, let's clear that up right away. No, he is not my long last father. My father is is is neither long nor lost. He doesn't have to wear a big black suit with a mask over his head and wields a lightsaber not often, Okay, alright, So anyway, parental controls are a subject of much debate simply because you know, let's get down in the nitty gradie. It's a form of censorship um about which many people, including Jonathan uh and I'm probably not gonna sound like, you know, an anti censorship person. But I also have two young daughters, one of which is uh too young to do any more than drool on the keyboard. But you know, recently I have a kindergartener who's very computer savvy, and uh started thinking about that the other day. Looked at the mac os and there's a parental control suite built into the operating system. Yes, just like there is for a for Microsoft Vista, and uh, these are these are really simple uh solutions. You know. It says turn off the computer at a certain time on school nights, or only allow them to use the computer for and then you get it to set half an hour, whole hour, three hours, and you get to pick So those kinds of things really okay, not censorship, but you do have some control over how much time your your child spends using the computer. Um, and they're built right into the operating systems, which you know, seem pretty cool. Now. They also go farther. You can allow them to block uh dirty words in the nictionary websites that might be offensive. Of course you're relying on somebody else to set those sites up, you know, and say, well, um, go ahead, and subscribe to these conventions, so you're sort of trusting somebody else to block your your websites for you. But um, you know that that's essentially how it works. And I thought, well, you know, I would like to limit my my kids time on the computer, so I set up a basic set of parental controls. UM. So I'm so far pretty happy with it. Cool cool, Yeah, back when, uh, back when I was a kid, UM, I was fortunate to be part of a LUs hold that had computers pretty early on. So I mean even when I was I guess about maybe twelve or thirteen, we had a computer. This is kind of dating myself a little bit, um, but we had, uh, the first real computer computer that we had. I'm not going to count the Texas instruments and please don't send me mad email about that, but it was the Apple to E, the Apple to me, and and we had an Apple to E. We had several games on it, um, which ostensibly were for me, but it was not unusual to find that my father playing playing games and beating my high scores. Um. But the the real reason we got it was because my my father writes novels. So um, our parental control system was dad coming into the office and kicking me off the computer so that he could write the next chapter of his book, which was you know necessary because in order to supplement his income and pay for my education and everything along those lines and those of my sister, you know, he kind of had to. So that was the old style of rental control where it was very much hands on. But yeah, today, when you've got kids who have their own computers now or their own phone lines, I mean you've got a lot more technology available, and some of it geared specifically towards children. Um, you really have to take these other things into consideration. It's not like, you know, we can only afford one machine for the entire house now. Um, you know, the prices have dropped so much that it's not a luxury item anymore. Um, not for a lot of families anyways. For some families, yes it still is. But for many families, you know, it's not unusual to find three or four computers in the household. So in that case, you can't really just you know what, pop your head in every five minutes and make sure that your kids not jumping back online to to check out the internet. It's it's not really practical. So and I can I can begrudgingly agree that these are unnecessary. Uh has died to use the word eve, But they are necessary um in many cases. Uh yeah, well see they they actually hurt me a little bit. Yeah, I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. Of course, parental controls don't go only, they don't stop at the edge of your computer screen. There are also other, many other screens that you'll find parental controls on, like your TV, the beachip which is built in actually to the TV itself, which is supposed to UM allow the rating system to sort of help you control what can and can't be seen. Um. But you know, you'll also find it on a lot of set top boxes, like a cable or satellite subscriber. You'll um in many cases find that there's some way to knock out certain channels. Uh. Personally, I like doing that with the shopping channels. So yeah, I put a little password in there because I, you know, I don't really want to watch them. Um. Well, and and really technology has become so pervasive that it's it's that's pretty much why you need these things. So kind of let's let's go back to the computer one for a bit, because I did write an article that that that dovetail tails into this conversation. UM. It's not directly relevant, but UM tangentially, I suppose, which was about Internet censorship and UM. One of the big problems are that that advocacy groups have, with privacy advocacy groups and and and UM and free speech advocacy groups have with these kind of UH solutions is that they're not the most elegant or accurate UM ways to prevent people from seeing certain sites. A lot of them depend on UM blacklists. So in that case, like Chris was saying earlier, you're depending on someone else saying this site is inappropriate for people to look at at work or for children to have access to UM. And so that's just a list of websites that that someone else somewhere has determined are not appropriate for you or your your kids to look at. But in other cases they use keyword blocking, so it's kind of like a search engine. You know. Search engines will often UH scour a website and and categorize it by the keywords that are on there. So when you do a search for that keyword term, that's how they pop up well, the same sort of thing for these parental controls. They search for a database of keywords, and if those keywords show up or phrases in some cases UM, that site will automatically get blocked by the software. And the problem is that it doesn't always block the appropriate site. Sometimes it blocks stuff that really you should have access to. UM. I have a I have friends who work at the Center for Disease Control and some of them work in uh in realms which require them to do research on things like sexually transmitted diseases. But with certain software blocking applications on their are website blocking applications, they can't go to the sites they need to go to to do research because they these keywords are popping up and that the information is being blocked. So there are times where this can really prevent you from from even doing your job right. So that's kind of uh that's that's why I look at this is sort of a downside in many ways. Now, when you're talking about kids, it's a different it's a different matter altogether. But the problem is that these these parental controls aren't being applied just by parents too kids. They're being applied by by companies to employees or in some cases by governments to citizens. True enough, there are instances even of I s p s Internet service providers who are filtering content that comes into UH into homes based on their content for you know, actually have heard of politic coal content being censored. UM. And we're just talking about in the United States. Of course, there are other places like China who are famous where you know, they're famous for blocking large, large volumes of content on the Internet, and Cuba, which has its own intranet which acts like an Internet but is really all self contained. It doesn't really access anything to the outside, so it really insulates the citizens. That's true. It's one of those things to UH that people try to use it for uh. You know, applications such as libraries, public libraries where um you know, in this case, you wanted to shut down at a certain point to uh to log off all the computers in the library. But um, you know, there is a big debate in many library circles UM over whether or not it is a good idea or a bad idea to UH to allow censorship. Of course, you don't want uh. Your child is working on a term paper, UM for a class, you don't want somebody surfing the internet for for porn right next to them. But at the same time, you know, is it right? You know, one of the central tenants to UH to the American Library Association's uh you know code is that you're supposed to open these channels and and fight censorship and all fronts. I know this because I'm pursuing my degree in library and information sciences. So this is a topic We've talked about a lot lately, but um, it is. It is one of those things where they you know, there are people fighting on both sides of it. They see a reason for it. But you know, for as far as the kids are concerned, but as far as adults are concerned, do you apply the same rules and in what way? Right? It's difficult? Yeah? Yeah. Do you put a do you have a separate section in the library? I mean, and if actually does that, does that is that inappropriate in the way because it casts a certain light on the people who go in there. One of the one of the most popular ways of handling it is to notify the library customer that they are being they are not using a filtered internet connection, and to offer an unfiltered internet connection to that person, you know, as an alternative, it's like, well, here it is. You know. Of course they also risk losing federal funding for these projects because that's part of the legislation. And and this is you know, it's just gonna get more complicated. It's not gonna get uh easy. You know, it's not gonna there there's no easy answers to this, and it's not gonna you know, there's no solutions gonna pop up in the next thirty seconds or something. I mean, you're hearing the latest news I've heard about. This is for airlines that are considering, you know that they're starting to use um, I'm starting to WiFi enable right in flight Internet that have WiFi enabled uh um in flight services, so you pay to have access to the internet and you can surf the web on your laptop in flight for a fee. UM. And there are people they're both customers. There are airline personnel like like flight attendants and even pilots who are all concerned about whether or not they should put in filters to block people from surfing for porn on an airplane flight. Right, And I mean that that's definitely one of those situations where you're you're thinking, really, why would you want to You're sitting next to perfect strangers. And I've heard arguments about this. I've heard arguments that say, well, why would you look on someone else's screen? Well, it's in your field of vision. I mean, you know, I don't know about you, but my my vision does extend beyond directly straight in front of me, and the way the way you're sitting in an airplane. Let mean, if you're in coach, I mean you know, you're your elbows are and sticking in the ribs of the person next to you. There's not a whole lot of space there. Well, if you think about it. The one of the biggest arguments that I've heard for people who do not want airlines to allow cell phone use is they don't want to hear everybody else talking. No, I don't having their personal phone conversations. Well, why would you want to? You know, I'll give that some credit. You know, you're a captive audience for your four hour flight. You have to sit next to this person in very close proximity. If you don't want to flight, you can't switch seats or anything like. Yeah, So, I mean I don't really want to watch somebody sir, for porn, you know, sitting right next to them and coach and I want to but no, particularly not when you're a captive audience strapped into a seat at thirty thou feet that that definitely does not have appeal to me. And I've heard suggestions, perhaps tongue in cheek for solutions like having the curtained off area in the back of the plane so you can just have the porn section. And just do we really need to turn airplanes into that kind of environment. I mean, we used to have the smoking sections, which, depending on your point of view, we're bad enough. From my own point of view, definitely bad enough, so I'm glad those are gone. But I mean, it's just such a kin of worms um and and even though I am vehemently anti censorship, I guess it's one of those things where it's okay as long as it doesn't impact me, because I can I can definitely say that if I were sitting next to someone and they were looking at inappropriate material, however you may define that, it would definitely make me uncomfortable. And I mean it just seems wildly inappropriate. You you you would hope people would use their individual judgment and come to the conclusion of, hey, this is something I should only look at in the privacy of my own home, bathroom, closet, whatever, um, and not on a seven thirty seven going on a transatlantic flight. You know. But you can't necessarily trust that people will do that. So that's where the kind of worms comes in. And that's what I think I'm going to have to do eventually with my kids. Um. You know, they're, at least as far as I can tell, um, you know, pretty smart kids, and they're gonna have to you know, they're gonna be able to get around a lot of the paroun controls I could set up for them. You know, they'll find some way to do it, because you know that's the kids are smart and uh you know, and they soak up information so quickly, see as fast as we come put up barriers that are gonna know ways around them. It's kind of it's it's both admirable and scary. Yes it is. And you know, I think I think you're right. I think what it comes down to is educating people and saying, look, you know this isn't appropriate at this time. You don't want to do this in front of all these people. You don't want to expose people to things that you wouldn't want to be exposed to, and here's why. And you have to uh to get in there and explain what it is, what's going on, and say, you know, you're gonna have to use your judgment. Yeah, so we're getting back to the old parental control. Exactly interesting, right, You can't just solely depend upon technology. Although technology can certainly help you out, you can't. You can't depend on that as the the cure all solution. Um. Yeah, and you've got to hope that we don't have too many Andy Kaufman's out there, because those are the exactly the kind of people who would want to push your buttons and do what you're not supposed to do in public just to see how people react. And there's always going to be those people, but hopefully they'll be in the minority. Well. I guess that about wraps up this discussion. If you want to learn more, you can read all about internet censorship on how stuff Works dot Com right now, and we'll talk to you again soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com? Let us know what you think, Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you