<massive snippage>
Oh my god this is long.
I read all of the other responses to this thread, and I agree with what
most people are saying.
I've gotten this question 100's of times from (former, beloved, missed)
ISP customers. And neighbors. And relatives...
The absolute #1 best thing to do is to be a parent first, police second.
This involves education AND spending time together on-line. I feel the
same way in the case of adults in a corporate setting - education, and a
clear policy on appropriate computer use, solves 99% of the problem.
Number 2 is to be forthcoming with any monitoring or preventative measures
that are taken. In fact, I've seen this work REALLY well in a corporate
environment, where adult website access was rampant (more on this
below...) Anyways, parents should be honest with their offspring. It's
better to let them know beforehand what measures will be taken. You'd
rather have them know ahead of time, than finding out about your
monitoring when you've busted them and they're already mad (and the damage
has been done). Now, I don't own any kids, but if I did, this would be
the way I'd run the show.
A word on the pederasts...child predators on-line are not alwaays easy to
spot. Especially when curiosity or hormones are involved. Reading
transcripts of some of these logs (more on this...), it's obvious to you
and me that the person is a pedo, but the child is sometimes blinded by
"my parents overreact, the media blew this out of proportion, he's *so*
handsome and funny..." These people, sadly, are very good at what they
do. For instance, they bring up any subject, "So you like computers?"
(obviously, since they're on The AOL!!!) the question invites, "Does your
dad work with computers for a living?" Chances are, the child will name
daddy's occupation, which helps the pedo determine when daddy's most
likely to be home, if he's a big burly construction worker or a wimpy
executive (in case daddy catches him...) Then that's an in for finding
out about mom and the rest of the family. I used these tactics on Munir
last night when I posed as SexyGirl16 and was trying to get him to talk
dirty to me over AIM. ("How big's your disk? Oooh....and how much RAM?")
These people are more than capable of getting a reasonable picture of who
else is in the house at various times of the day, what kind of bait to
entice the child with, etc, with just a few innocent questions. They are
just playing the odds. The "more on this" was to mention that any parent
who hasn't yet eaten their own offspring, should read some of the chat
transcripts at www.perverted-justice.com. I read some of these a couple
of years ago (this site was highlighted on the news), and was shocked.
No, wait, nothing shocks me anymore, I've seen the proxy logs...but I was
disgusted.
My other "more on this" was about monitoring. I had a customer at ISP #1
that had an employee porn-surfing problem. When I went out there to setup
the web proxy, they asked about what to do now that they had logs of
everything. I told them to announce to their staff that they were turning
on web logging due to abuse, and would be monitoring the logs for
inappropriate activity. I guarantee you none of those employees wanted to
be "caught with their pants down", as it were...and the problem went away.
I've been asked more recently how to deal with this in a corporate
environment. My favorite suggestion so far has been that the company
should setup a proxy log reporting tool (like Sarg), and actually e-mail
the users their previous day's web activity every morning. I think this
is a far better solution than the alternatives, because:
a) having staff sift through logs looking for "the pervs" doesn't scale in
a 20,000 person company
b) content and URL filtering doesn't work - it ends up being an arms race
trying to keep up with the porn industry (who are constantly coming
up with new ways to help users get around corporate monitoring or
filtering, or you end up blocking legitimate sites, and staff spends way
too much time allowing certain sites
c) I don't enjoy pulling up www.milfhunter.com to see if it's an adult
site. (ok, I actually do...nice mommy!)
Alternatively, telling the users that a random sampling will be examined
(ala random drug tests for pro athletes...), or that the report will be
e-mailed to them daily, and a weekly summary to their supervisor...who can
escalate to Human "We'll bring your personal effects out to you"
Resources.
I'm not a parent, but I can certainly appreciate the difficulties and
responsibilities involved. As for me and the 'lil woman, other people's
kids, in small doses, is enough for us. I'll stick with the dogs TYVM :)