Parents To Block Kids From Joining MySpace

Reservoir Hill writes "A New York Times blog notes that attorneys general of 49 states are announcing a partnership with MySpace to fight sexual predators on social networks by letting parents submit the e-mail addresses of their children, so the company can prevent anyone from using that address to set up a profile. MySpace will also set up a 'closed' section for users under age 18 so only their established online friends can visit their pages. MySpace also promises to hire a contractor to identify and delete pornographic images on the site. 'This set of principles is a landmark and milestone because it involves an acknowledgment of the importance of age and identity authentication,' said Connecticut attorney General Richard Blumenthal." Blumenthal also actually said "If we can put a man on the moon..."

Blocking email addresses?

With a half-zillion free email providers out there, blocking a kid's email address will last all of two minutes. All they have to do is create an alias at Gmail, Yahoo, etc.

It reminds me of the early days of Hotmail, when they "verified" that you were a US resident by having you enter a matching city and ZIP code. Which just meant that all their overseas users lived in Beverly Hills, 90210.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

You think 90210 is fun? Well I'm from Canada, so whenever I need a fake address, I use the postal code H0H 0H0. Looks like I'm getting some coal in my stocking.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

This isnt about providing real security. Its about myspace getting some publicity and paying lip service to doing the right thing. Its more symbolic than anything. Sure, people will still get around it, but myspace will be able to say "hey, we are doing our best to stop them".

Re:Blocking email addresses?

So? Fake problem, fake solution, everybody's happy.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

Its about myspace getting some publicity and paying lip service to doing the right thing.

I disagree. This was all about elected politicians getting publicity and paying lip service to make it appear they are doing something about a "problem" that was way overblown by the media to begin with.

Myspace is going along with it because they have to--but the horse and pony show belongs to the state attorney generals, not Myspace.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

well I don't know about you, but in my house, everyones email login and password is saved locally on every machine in the house.

My son could bypass any system to verify parental consent easily. However, in my house we practice this apparently rare thing called, 'mutual respect' whereby he doesn't do such things, and I don't invade his privacy. It's all about trust really, and that has to be taught, it can't be either assumed or enforced by stupid schemes like this one.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

That takes me back. I used to scam my parents all the time too, and it won't be long until my kids are old enough to look me in the eye with a straight face and lie through their teeth. They grow up so fast. :(

Re:Blocking email addresses?

I bet your parents weren't capable of putting a sniffer on the network and recording all of your traffic, either.

You, on the other hand... ...and don't give me crap about "kids have a right to privacy." They don't, especially when it comes to communication with strangers.

Re:Blocking email addresses?

Wow. And yeah, since drugs are available in school, from friends, etc. etc. etc. might as well give up on that argument.

In fact, let's just throw up our hands and let the children do anything they want with no limits, responsibility, or guidelines. I mean, they're just going to do it anyway. Right?

If you are a parent, I have to say you're a very bad one. If you're not, don't have kids. We don't need to protect and insulate our kids from the world, we need to educate them and raise them to be aware of what's around them.

Great idea.. Parents always know their kids emails

Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......

Someone needs a dose of reality.

Re:Great idea.. Parents always know their kids ema

This is just another attempt by some politicians to claim that they are fighting to protect our children. Later on, when nobody actually remembers any of this, these politicians can tell a cheering crowd, "I worked hard to give parents the ability to limit their child's MySpace access, and help shield their children from sexual predators online." Of course it is idiotic, and children will find a way around it in less than a minute, but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program, not another pathetic attempt at technical measures to block their access.

This is arguably the stupidest thing ...

I've seen on Slashdot all month. Parents can submit email addresses all day long, and their kids will create disposable addresses all day long.

Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.

Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ...

the first thing that came to my mind was, how to create a high-quality list of edresses for the nation's pedophiles to seek.

Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ...

Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.

you know, you can apply that answer to MUCH of what is going on with the government, today.

sad but true.

Re:This is arguably the stupidest thing ...

Pointless, but I suppose it makes the parents feel like they're doing something.

you know, you can apply that answer to MUCH of what is going on with the government, today.

1. Something must be done!
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, it must be done
4. ???
5. Regulation!

Cool

I'll start by submitting the e-mail addresses of everyone I dislike and claim to be their parents and say that they are lieing about their age. Another well thought out government idea.

Re:Cool

Why not submit your friends' email addresses? Friends don't let friends join myspace!

Statistics

And exactly how many rapes and molestations occur because of MySpace? How about we place the same restrictions on schools and churches, where you are certainly more likely to end up being molested.

Also, since when did we place the responsibility on the WEBSITE to prevent an IP address from reaching it? And what about DHCP? What about the next person that gets your IP in a few months? Why can't you filter out access on your own rather than placing the burden of your absurd paranoia on websites that have nothing to do with your ridiculous "my baby gonna get raped" fantasies?

And no, I didn't RTFA. Look at my UID. I'm old school and that's how I roll.

Contractor paid to search for porn?

What do you bet there may be a long list of people wanting that job?

So.. wouldn't this give them an alibi?

"Your honor, I trusted myspace to verify the age of the people I met online. I know she only looks 13 your honor, but her profile said she was 19!"

Attack tree

So, in security, we have this notion called an "attack tree". Let's suppose you want to stop someone from stealing your family jewels. You put the in a safe, and all is well, right? Well... maybe not. We create this tree, where the root is "steal the jewels", and the children under the root are various ways you might accomplish this ("Use a key to open the safe", "Drill out the hinges on the safe", "Create hole in safe"). And each of these nodes can be divided out further into more children, so to use a key for example, you either need to steal a key, or be one of the people who has a legitimate use for the key, or be the locksmith who installed the lock.

Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.

For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.

Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".

Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.

I'm going to go ahead and fix this story

Today, the Attorneys General of 49 states took another step towards running for governor by knocking down yet another straw-man.

There, fixed that story for you. No need to thank me.

Real problems

So rather then deal with many times a day actual sexual abuse of young people AGAINST THEIR WILL by adults, they're choosing to put all attention, and diverting everyone else's attention, to a problem that is at least 50% the fault of the young person and happens maybe twice a month at the most.

Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.

Despite shows like "Catch a Predator", 13-15 year old girls who have casual sex with 40 year olds they've talked to for a few hours online don't show up in news articles or in victimization reports-I'm betting they're rare to the point of extinction. More importantly, I SERIOUSLY doubt that 13-15 year olds are inviting strangers they've never talked to over the phone or seen via web cam to their homes for sex. Even the dumbest teen girls seem to have some ability to read body language and facial expressions via video and/or hear tone, inflection over audio. I don't think they're inviting total strangers to their house.

BUT, this is what we've been led to believe. We've been told there's a problem based solely on the existence of demand. We know there's no shortage of adult men willing to engage in casual sex with 13 year old girls, but we haven't been shown that there's even 1 girl willing to reciprocate for every 1000 guys.

Everybody goes nuts over this manufactured problem and take attention away from real victimization-that is young people being sexually abused against their will and without their consent. Real abuse is ignored in favor of virtually non-existent abuse.
Even worse is the fact that any teen girls meeting men online for sex is going of her own free will, whether her consent is informed or not is another issue. It seem that she would bear at least 40% of the blame for anything that happens.

The persons most likely to sexually abuse young people are the same people being constantly implored to monitor their teens every move-parents, step parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, teachers, priests, coaches, neighbors. Strange guy on the internet is somewhere above that guy that works the 7-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 5pm.

Re:Sign up for another address

I'd like to see the parents asking their twelve year old girl what her email address is so they can lock down her myspace account and see where they went wrong when their child responds with "sweetltlhottie69@hotmail".

With an e-mail address like that they're going to be even more surprised to find out that their 12-year-old daughter is actually a lonely 40-year-old man.

Re:Censorship? Really?

Except that this isn't parents trying to provide a good environment, it is just parents trying to bar their children from access to a certain website. Parents trying to provide a good environment would sit down and talk about the dangers of sexual predators on MySpace and similar websites, and instruct their children to immediately contact mommy or daddy if someone starts propositioning them for sex (not that we live in a culture where parents are encouraged to discuss anything pertaining to sex with their children). Growing up, the Internet was just starting to reach its current level of popularity, and my mother was very clear with me when we got our first computer about what to do if someone asked to meet me or started talking about sex, I listened, and there was never a problem with me using the computer, even if I was unsupervised.

Oh well, we haven't encouraged parents to actually speak to their kids about this stuff for a long time, opting to shield children from anything deemed harmful by anyone.