Mesa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_nakedness_and_clothing

Do you ever eat out at restaurants?

Drinking culture

You could accept that premise, and I'd argue that in that case if child internet safety is an issue, then the only solutions are either to force safety protocols or to leave kids in jeopardy.

I meant there would be no way to stop any OS from just waving users through and automatically converting their account into an 'adult account', or just asking users "Are you 18 yes/no". How many variations of Linux are there now?

Right, but in this case, the parental controls just wouldn't be doing their job. I mean, you're right—there's nothing you can do about that. But if I'm turning on a setting to enable a parental control and it doesn't enable the parental control, then I'm 1) complaining about Microslop in the case of Windows, or 2) switching my kids to a different distro in the case of Linux. Again, I'm against the idea of government-mandated on the OS side. I'm undecided on the website side of things.

I'm gonna transcribe a section of a comment I made in another post:

Upon setting up the device or account, it is the parent's responsibility to create a password or biometric or whatever to activate/deactivate the safety mode. No personal information required. It should be pretty easy. Are there technically ways for the kid to get around this? Yes, but that'd be breaking the trust. In the same way you'd deal with your kid sneaking out of the house, you deal with that separately. | https://programming.dev/comment/22589550

I'd be in favour of the government commissioning and funding this and making it free-to-access for parents.

That's interesting. I'm in America and, unless it's FOSS, I definitely 100% do not trust a government-commissioned application that needs to see and manage all of my home's network traffic in order to work. Especially not right now.

One thing I said before is the question of what is the research on this, and how do we know child internet safety is actually a problem? I don't know the statistics on this, and I haven't done much studying on it yet. So I will admit that I have been operating under the premise that this is an issue to begin with. Someone mentioned routers with parental blocks. Aside from being able to easily disconnect from the network (inevitability for kids because it's easy and they have plausible deniability, in my opinion), if child internet safety is currently an issue, then clearly there is something about it that isn't working.

But even if it happened purely at the OS level, it would be laughably unenforceable at best.

Don't get me wrong, it would still require another component whether that be a requirement for websites to query the OS via the browser, or a database of "bad" websites.

Now, if you want there to be an app that handles this, that's your opinion and I respect that. Personally, I would rather it be built into the OS. Least of all because already-on-your-device is easier than something parents need to research and download on their kids' devices. More significantly, if this kind of capability becomes an expectation for your general usage OSes to have, then that's less incentive for some company to come in and try to capitalize off of it and charge $12.99 per month, and then still have incentive to collect and sell data on which sites are being visited. I mean, you can be reasonably sure that Microsoft is gonna do that too, but that would be another reason to switch to a Linux distro that doesn't do that.

Whether it should be government-mandated is one question,

That:s my primary issue

That's my issue too. We're in agreement, but I just wanted to point out that the "it's the parent's job, not the OS's" doesn't communicate that and instead applies a blanket statement that actually undermines what you're saying you want.

The other guy is right when they say it applies to the check existing on the web-level. That is the issue, in my opinion, and I think people are just conflating that issue with the OS value's merit. Having a check at web level is actually what removes the responsibility and capability for parents to parent their children. Having it at the OS level makes it a tool for parents to use. They don't have to set it up, but the idea is that it makes it really easy for parents with zero computer prowess.

Again, should it be government mandated on the OS side? I strongly don't think so. But if anyone has a good solution to not mandate developers to respect the browser's report of the parental controls setting, I'd love to hear it (zero sarcasm, I don't want to have anyone breathing down my neck to implement this stuff either). The best I can think of is to take advantage of AI, but I can see why it could be unsavory. Should the browser itself carry a database of sites it has scanned and then use that to determine whether a site is safe? Should it query a user-owned model that's more customizable for the parent's tastes? Can we get that to run locally for everyone?

Sure. I think clearly this thread has been talking about the OS piece specifically. I wholly disagree with having some private company that collects IDs and makes the determination themselves. If instead your browser can just ask your device if you have parental controls enabled, then that removes the privacy concern entirely, as far as I know. Is there an extra data point for browser fingerprinting? Yeah, I guess. But I would also assume that anyone who cares to avoid this fingerprinting is going to not have parental controls enabled.

Essentially, I'm confused why the world gave up so quickly on parental controls (not really confused—the alternative provides more surveillance capability).

People keep saying this. Is it not within an operating system's purview to provide parents tools to configure what their kid can do with the system? Have parental controls been out-of-scope for all these OSes this whole time?

Whether it should be government-mandated is one question, but it seems more like this "it's the parent's job, not the OS's" has become a tagline that people just repeat rather than really thinking through it.

Is your expectation then that parents should sit over their kids' shoulder every moment that they access the internet? Are our tools not supposed to make that easier to handle?

At the very most, provide tools to help parents (e.g. on device filtering etc. or require companies to provide APIs to facilitate the same goal)

I thought that this is what you were getting at here, which is why I asked how this was an argument against values held locally on the device.

I am or am in the process of being rid of most of them except for Amazon. Unfortunately, there's no end in sight for Amazon.

Since email seems like the key to everything now, starting fresh with a new service was the most logical place to start for me. I went with Proton, largely because email and VPN in one payment. From there, replace (or transfer) old accounts one-by-one.

Where we think* it's likely to form. We've yet to find verifiable genesis elsewhere, and so we can't well determine whether the nature of our genesis is common or rare. And how many times has life started on Earth alone?

Similarly, our definition of life may need changing upon alien discoveries.

How can you provide the capability for parents to keep their children off inappropriate websites if you don't require that sites adhere to a conduct?

(I'm simply asking why this makes it an inherently bad solution—not suggesting that there aren't better solutions.)