The latest family drama is my nieces, now 9 and 10, went and Googled for Internet porn and they found some.  One of them 'fessed up and there was this back-and-forth between my sisters and somehow my mom got involved who was no help at all, our usual dysfunctional family B.S.  Anyway, one of my sisters was asking me about Internet porn blocking devices.  She also is making inquiries to Comcast.  I'm the wrong guy to ask because I've never had call to block it...quite the opposite if I may say so!  However, I don't have kids and I don't have kids using my computers.  If I did, it would be another story.

I knew this was going to happen sooner or later.  I was about their age when I started raiding my old man's skin mags.  The difference is the stuff you can access now is waaaay more hardcore than even the stuff in Club or Hustler was 30 years ago.  The most some of these sites will ask you is "Are you 18?"  There are tons and tons of sites out there with free content.  The smut purveyors DO NOT care if children see their product.  They only care about selling spammy ads and subscriptions to exclusive porno sites.  I guess they'd care if the feds nabbed them because they allowed minors to see pornography, but apparently, it's not a great concern or else they'd be a lot more restrictive. 

My sister told her daughter that pornography did not reflect what sex was about.  She didn't shame her daughter, but made it clear that there are a lot of things in pornography that are unhealthy and things she is not ready to see.  Something like that.  I thought my sister handled the "explaining" part pretty well.  I haven't talked to my other sister about it because lines of communication between the two of us are tenuous at best.  More dysfunctional family stuff.  Anyway, my sister made my niece promise she would not look at any more porn on the Internet.  My sister and I both know the uncomfortable truth.  The promise is liable to be broken.  Once a kid gets curious about sexuality, the curiosity doesn't go away.  I remember my curiosity leading me to places I regretted going.  I'm sure it will be the same with my nieces.  C'est la vie.  However, my sister feels a responsibility -- and I agree -- to protect her daughter as best as she can from the damaging pornography that is so abundant on the internet.  If it was just pictures of naked people, I wouldn't be so concerned...but it is a hell of a lot more than that.  Porn is all mixed up with anger, sarcasm, misogyny, shame, and racism.  If you're an adult and you know what's what, that part is not so dangerous.  If you don't like what you see, don't watch.  However, at an impressionable age, exposure to that kind of junk can be scary and hurtful.

Of course my sister does supervise her daughter's Internet activities, but as the girl gets older, she gets craftier.  It's impossible to supervise everything all the time. 

What do those of you with children do?  Do you use porn blockers?  Which ones, if any, are useful?  I might make some suggestions to my sister, but I honestly don't know enough about the subject.
???

Good question, Max.  I would like to find a decent porn blocker myself.  I haven't caught any searches like that yet, but you never know.  My daughter is 12 and kids that age are curious.

Yes...I have 4 children and we use Trend Micro Internet Security Pro to block unwanted sites. Only my wife and I have the password to bypass the Parental Controls.

But it has some drawbacks....we were trying to look at properties on the L.J. Hooker website and it was blocking us (darn ...those hookers  ::)).

All in all ....it's been a pretty effective tool.  But that won't hide the sometimes 'very off' comments on some of the youtube clips etc.

I use the same thing as gibbo - only mine is Trend Micro Internet Security 2010. Does almost the same thing as pro but is about $20 cheaper.
It comes with parental controls and I set mine up to include the router. That way anyone on my router cannot access pron without the password.
The other thing is that it comes with 3 registry keys, so I installed it on The Son's laptop and Hubby's. When I put it on The Son's, I made sure I ok'd almost everything, and added filters for non-approved sites.

I think Max the best thing is for your sister to buy an internet security program, that way she can control things.
Of course, you can set up google search to "safe search" but that is easily changed with one click and without a password.

I wish them luck!

This is something I wonder about a lot - what today's kids are going to be like when they get older.  I can't even fathom what I would have thought had I seen some of the things that are out there when I was a young girl.  But today's kids see that and more on a regular basis.  I'm not trying to be a prude, but my hell, there is some effed up stuff on the internet!!!  And really, what can you do?  Like Max said, it's hardly preventable, and kids are more than crafty.  They're better at finding stuff than you or I will ever be.  It scares the crap out of me. 

It sounds like Tam and Gibbo reccommended some good blockers, so that helps.  But I certainly don't envy your sister, or any other parents out there for that matter.

I will never forget when my dad got the internet.  My husband and I went over to his house a few days later, and it had been more than obvious what he had been looking at.  I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole when he asked me if I'd ever heard of some of the stuff he'd run across.  I said "dad, I really don't think you and I should be having this conversation!"  It was like having some sort of surreal, backwards birds and bees discussion where I was supposed to explain the "new" stuff to him.  It's a wonder I didn't run out of the house yelling with my hands over my ears!  ;D

I know how this would have been handled in my house.

1--Mom would have kicked my ass.  ;D

2--Mom would have thrown the computer out in the backyard and broken it with a baseball bat ala "office space"

3--I would have watched my MJ collection go out after the computer, cause she would have sworn I was looking for MJ.  ::)


LOL.

Yes...I have 4 children and we use Trend Micro Internet Security Pro to block unwanted sites. Only my wife and I have the password to bypass the Parental Controls.

But it has some drawbacks....we were trying to look at properties on the L.J. Hooker website and it was blocking us (darn ...those hookers  ::)).

All in all ....it's been a pretty effective tool.  But that won't hide the sometimes 'very off' comments on some of the youtube clips etc.


Thanks everybody!

My sister said that was the problem with the pr0n blocker she initially got.  It blocked everything, including Amazon.com, so she got rid of it.  That was before the incident. 

The thing is, if you have to block it site-by-site, you're locking the barn door after the horse is out. 

There is also a pragmatic reason as well as a moral/legal reason for blocking pr0n -- those sites are the biggest vectors of spyware and viruses on the 'Net.  Gambling sites might be as bad, but I never visit those. 

I'll recommend the above-mentioned applications to my sister. 

It seems to me that parents have moral obligations to try and protect their kids from 'Net pr0n, but it also seems like kids are going to end up seeing it anyway.  I would impress upon kids 'Net surfing that it is impossible to un-see something.  The image I go back to is something I saw in Hustler when I was about eleven.  It wasn't even pr0n.  It was a picture of a woman dying from tertiary syphilis.  It was one of Larry Flynt's shock exposes on the dangers of STDs.  That was the kind of picture even medical students don't like.  At the age of eleven, my brain was just not ready to see it, so the effect was traumatic.  I saw the same picture again in college, and I thought, "Oh, that's what had me all freaked out.  Pretty horrifying..."  It didn't really bother me.  What you can handle seeing at the age of 11 versus age 22 are quite different. 

I guess it's all part of growing up.  If I had a kid, I would want her to feel she could come and talk to me about something she saw that was disturbing to her, even if it was Internet pr0n I had forbidden.

The hypersexual pop culture pushed on preteens and teens is more insidious than pr0n.  I don't like this message that the way to get attention and status is to shake your stuff and put out.  I also don't like this "inner princess" crap.  If I had a daughter, I'd probably give her Bikini Kill records for her 13th birthday!  Far better Riot Grrrrl than Paris Hilton!
8)