We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. / Robert Wilensky (Wikiquote)
Recently, the topic of the need for a filtering solution for Internet content has found its way to our family’s WhatsApp group and a flaming debate started.
Obviously, the harmful consequences of Internet porn addiction as well as the natural curiousity of youngsters came up. Naturally, one of the ideas that became very popular throughout the conversation was the usage of Internet content filtering services to “overcome” this issue. Even though this issue is not one of the usual issues that are discussed here, due to the importance of that issue I decided to make an exception and write this post about it.
First, a little bit about myself: I grew up as a normal kid (dorky – sure… but still, otherwise normal) in the 80’s and 90’s of the previous century (it makes me feel sooooo old to acknowledge that…:-)) when the Internet became more and more dominant in my daily life. As the Internet grew more and more rapidly and more and more useful websites appeared, pornographic and erotic websites soon followed. Before the Internet era, I was an average bookworm, I read every book that I could – from Sherlok Holmes to Sholem Aleichem. After I bought my first PC and especially after purchasing my first modem I officially became a qualified computer geek who would choose to send files to the neigbour at the end of the street via a 56k modem instead of using floppy disks and your bicycle even though it would be more than ten times slower.
Throughout all this period I had unfiltered access to the Internet and I still wasn’t tempted to watch this kind of content. People around me claim that I was (and perhaps still am) an exceptional kid. Is that so?
The first films intentended for commercial cinema use where created close to the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, soon after that the first pornographic films were created. Even today, the pornographic industry was the first to use the HD-DVD format and was also the first industry to adopt the VCR cassete format on such a large scale – making it the de-facto standard. The written pornographic history is probably as old as press industry itself. Many sex shops exist througout Tel-Aviv, few of them were on my way to work but I was never tempted to go inside any of them and purchase anything they offerred. Why is it that I was never tempted to enter any of these shops while many other people entered them?
Because of the severe consequences of pornography addiction, especially in childhood and adolescence, some Haredi jews have forbidded the usage of the Internet completely. However, even religously speaking, is it the move?
In my opinion, our world was created in such a way that every tool that was created by men holds both the potential for good usage as well as bad and malicous. Whenever the good potential goes up – the bad potential will also increase. For example, let’s take a kitchen knife like the one you use to cut small vegtables, it isn’t very dangerous but also the good usages of it are rather few, but if, for example, we’ll take a chef’s knife, there are many good uses for it but there also more bad uses for it too. The Internet, which started as the ARPANet, a network that was built by the United States Federal Goverment in the dark days of the cold war in order allow the United States to continue to function even after a nuclear explosion and be able to strike back. Such a network that can have such huge good potential would undoubtfully have huge bad potential too.
As a religious person (or at least trying to be one…), I believe that Jewdism teaches us how elevate daily activities that every creature does like eating or drinking, to a higher level by enforcing some sort of control over those mundane activities, for example: we can eat and drink but not on some days, etc. I believe that the same approach should be taken in the case of the Internet.
I think that the main reason for which I managed not to be tempted to use these kind of contents was the open and liberal attitude of my parents towards almost everything that was part of my life. This kind of upbringing made it possible for me to come to my parents and consult them about every question or decision while other teenagers my age did their best to hide whatever they did from their parents (which proved again and again as an easy thing to do) I always tried to share more and more. Today, as a parent myself, I view my role in my children’s life not as a filter which its job is to provide my children with a protected and filtered environment – exactly the opposite: I always considered it a duty to provide my children with the best tools and abilities to handle whatever this world can throw at them. I think that as a parent our most important duty is to prepare our children for the day we won’t be here to protect them. The essence of this type of upbringing hasn’t changed for centuries, even before the era of cellular phones and the Internet, generations and generations of boys and girls which chose not to consume pornographic content. It is clear to me that those children then, our grandparents or parents today, made those choices not because some rabbi told them to but because of the open and liberal education they received.
The only solution for this, in my opinion, is complete and deep involvement of the parents in their children life. I saw many parents, both younger and older that talk about their children and you can see that they don’t really have a clue about who are their children’s friends, what do they like (and don’t like) to eat, what do they like to do on their leisure time etc. In order to really be involved in your child’s life, we need to be involved in such a way that our children won’t feel that he or she is being watched or under surveillance but instead – that we are genuinely want to be a part of his or her life. It starts with some “floor time” with your toddlers, through board games in the afternoon in older ages, encouraging the child to ask questions about any subject while really trying to find an answer for him – even if not right away. Such an attitude will, in my opinion, be the only way to effectively reduce the use of drugs, cigarettes, violence, vandalism, pornography and even reduce the number of the car crashes. Such attitude also has a cost: the need for such an investment of time and emotional resources. Try, at least once, instead of taking your kid to the nearest FEC, to play with them an imaginary game or a board game and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
I perfectly understand that for the purpose of teaching those parents might need to use some technological accessories but those accessories should be limited to assisting the child and the parent in learning how to “tame the beast” and gain control over the Internet. It is critical that parents will understand that their involvement cannot be replaced by any technological measures for surveillance, monitoring or filtering. Any such technological measure would inherently suffer from some or all the following flaws:
Tools that are based on software that is installed on the user’s computer – These tools would normally allow the user to bypass the filtering mechanisms by using an administrator’s password. Passwords are already considered to be insecure measure of authentication. There are many free tools that can try many passwords repeatedly within seconds in order to find the correct password (a.k.a brute-force attack). Also, there are many free tools that are called “Key Loggers” that record every key stroke on the keyboard to a file that your kid can find your password later. All that is true of course but it can be even easier: your kid can simply shoulder glance your password… And also every tool that is installed on the computer can be removed from it.
Tools that are based on textual or graphical analysis of the website before displaying it – These tools will look for clues in the website’s content that would indicate the type of content being served by that website. These tools, like the tools that are trying to filter out spam emails, are based on statistic and heuristic approaches to detect the true content of a website. These approaches currently (and probably inherently) suffer from limitations that cause them to classify legitimate websites as problematic and vice versa. It is important to understand that those websites’ owners spend a lot of money and efforts to build their website in such a way that will try (and succeed) to “confuse” these filters to believe that their website is a legitimate website even if it’s not.
Tools that are running at the Internet service provider – These tools are exposed to almost all the vulnerabilities I described earlier (passwords, unreliable technology) but also, these tools rely on lists (white lists that list the allowed sites and black lists that list the forbidden websites). It all sounds fine until you understand (if you really can…) how big is the Internet and how fast is it growing. A survey performed near the end of 2002 has indicated that there were 2,024 million active webpages at that time, another survey that was performed at the end of January 2005 indicated that there are more than 25.21 billion pages and on July 2008, Google has detected more than 1 trillion unique addresses on the Internet. Given such a huge growth rate, is it even realistic to think that there will be someone (your Internet service provider for instance) that would be able to catalog EVERY webpage on the internet? Is it really reasonable to assume that assume that “good” websites won’t suddenly add “bad” content? (Just think of the cleanest news website that you know) In addition, are you sure that every “good” website would be classified as “good” by you? It is important to realize that the standards for “good” and “bad” websites are very different from one family to another.
Anyway, every type of tool you’ll choose would have to deal with another “issue”: encrypted websites. Every website that you surf to that its address starts with “https://” is a website that all the data from your computer to the website and from the website to your computer is encrypted. That means that almost every tool you’ll choose for filtering your Internet traffic won’t be able to tell to which website you just surfed and therefore won’t be able to block your access to a specific website without blocking your entire access to all encrypted websites. The only type of tools that actually stand a chance are those which are installed on your computer which – again suffer from the issues I described earlier. The problem gets even worse for these tools when websites that are usually accessed without encryption, added the ability to use encryption and by that allowing the user to bypass almost every filtering mechanism in place. There’s no need to add that blocking encrypted communication completely will basically prevent the user from accessing almost any website, including banks, government sites, health services, etc.
If all this is not enough, many search engines (such as Google) hold a copy of the pages and images on their servers in order to improve the perfomance and to allow the search engine to return a thumbnail or a preview version of the website being searched for. These copies which are called cache are stored on the search engine servers. So every such filtering mechanism will allow access to them since that they are being retrived from a “clean” site, just a search engine, right?
To conclude, it’s possible to say that the Internet, more than any invention, is basically a virtualization or a mirror of the real world, it contains a mirror of the dangers in the real world as well as the advantages of the real world as well as the time-wasters of the real world. The Internet has shortened the distances between people regardless of the physical distance between them, saved countless lives of people who chose to commit suicide but instead of leaving a note somewhere decided to post a message on a chat or forum and by doing so – allowed the rescuers to track them down and rescue them. The Internet also enabled people to communicate with each other almost for free but also allowed pedophiles and other perpetrators to track their innocent victims, allowed thieves to find out when you’re home, facilitated the murder of Ofir Rahum near Ramallah but also made it possible for me to meet the wonderful girl to which I eventually married.
The Internet surely forces us to think more, to educate more and reminds us the importance of the skills we provide for our children.
what is murder of Ofir Rahum ?
See here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ofir_Rahum