i'm 18, honest!

i've just been reading a report on the BBC news website about how culture secretary Andy Burnham is wanting to have all websites rated for content. As is usually the way for these things, Mr. Burnham hasn't actually presented any sensible or logical way to actually achieve this, just said it should be considered. Well okay, i'll give it some consideration... it's a stupid idea. i wasn't really rebellious during my teenage years but even i drank before i was legally allowed, looked at pornography on a few occasions behind the bike sheds and frequently i saw movies rated over my age. i wasn't meant to be able to achieve any of that and there were and indeed still are legal safeguards in place; the point is that, as a teenager, i and my friends felt the need and found ways to circumvent those safeguards.

Around the same sort of time, computing was just starting to become prevalent in both homes and schools; in both cases there were protections in place to prevent users in general doing certain things, either it was the copy protection to prevent the illegal distribution of computer games or password protected user accounts on the school network. And again those safeguards weren't impervious to attack, as with the physical safeguards such as age restrictions, they were actively seen as challenges, to a certain degree rites of passage that would win favour with peers.

And any measure Andy Burnham or the people he's brainstorming with regarding this issue come up with has to survive that; it's going up against children aged from nine upwards and, since i have some experience providing computing services to kids in that age range, he might as well be putting bullseyes on the firewalls because that's how they're going to be seen. There are probably few things more scary to a network administrator than a teenager on a mission, just about everything bar the kitchen sink will be thrown at whatever security measures are put in place on school networks and any little chink in the armour will be leveraged and widened as far as it can go; i've heard stories of supposedly secure systems where kids have found vulnerabilities in the way Windows Explorer displays printers to get access to drives and shares they weren't meant to and from there install software - and i've seen first hand that spyware can, regardless of user level, install itself past managed desktops and firewalls so there are ways and means for a creative child to see what their parents don't want them to, just as there have always been and, regardless of what campaigners think, will always be.

Don't get me wrong, i'm all for protecting children from seeing things that are meant for a mature audience and, although i may be a more liberal parent than most as to what i allow our kids to see, i do take measures to at least monitor what our kids are up to such as checking the caches from time to time and watching what is going through our gateway machine. What i have absolutely no time for is the concept of slapping age ratings on sites or the people who believe that this is going to keep kids away from that content if they really want to see it; the only thing that can police children on the internet is their parents, trying to do that kind of policing at an ISP level is just passing the parenting buck. That isn't the job of the state or legislation, it's not the job of internet service providers either - if parents are worried about what their children might see online then they should be watching where those children are going. And if they haven't the technical knowledge to do so, it's time to start learning rather than expecting someone else to do it for them.