Students Banned from Blogging
Catholic School Bans Students from Blogging
Okay I found this article on /. and this got me thinking. Would I want to prevent my child from blogging under the assumption it lets predators invade my childs life. I am not sure about you but since I have been blogging I have had the chance to get to know some really cool people and some not so cool. I check out the other personal page sites and remember my first page over at Expage. I did a Tripod Page and then moved on to a side project called Teen Alliance. I then kinda took a break and moved into the Satellite Radio Forum world and I have been in that public light since that moment.
I have hosted many personal pages and I have never really liked the format of being limited to the engine behind Xanga or MySpace. I love the blogger engine because you can customize everything in a tasteful way. But blogging is a new trend and hasn’t really been made easy until recently. I am not a fan of the MySpace culture and never really been into that because it’s just annoying and to much for me.
Xanga was an engine I looked at but again it’s something you have to pay for to make it worth any while and I have yet to see any Xanga page to impress me. I have not linked to any in a long while. LiveJournal is an alternative but you have to pay for that also to make it worthwhile. And I really do not want to pay for a service on top of my web hosting fees. I love the open standards of Blogger and just enjoy this wonderful community of Bloggers. I need to change my links page because the only people that seem to update are Jon and Junniper anymore. I need to expand my blogging horizons. Out of all the people that feed my hits Junniper comes in at #1 from the blogging community. I get 66% of my hits from blogger just from her. Kinda weird I only know her through blogger. She has asked me a couple questions I would like to answer for her but just not publically on here. But if you are reading this shoot me an e-mail and I will answer your questions.
But back to the topic at hand. If I had a child would I let him or her blog. Well being the bit of the computer guru I really don’t think I would let my child have access to myspace at home. Beacuse well most guys I know on that site are just out for sex. That is all they seek and the women they find are willing to give it to them. I wouldn’t be cool with that. There are exceptions to the rule. But blocking a site is easy enough but then I get to thinking where would I stop to protect my child online. My parents tried to block me from the internet when I was little. But that just inspired me to find ways around their stupid filters and being the young genius of computers at the time we had no real problem with doing this.
My High School North Kitsap High School had this filter known as Bess. Me and Darin had it cracked 2 days after the first day of school. We were not real concerned with being filtered we just liked the challenge of getting around it. Then they got smart and start blocking ports to the proxy servers we had setup. So we just got a bit more clever and would telnet into the library to surf the web. Then we discovered RDC with Windows 2000 Server and with the idea of Broadband we got around again. It wasn’t that complicated but most people our age had no idea how to do that.
Pretty much every rule that North Kitsap High School has in place for computers was because of me and Darin. We got into a lot of trouble but easily got out of it. We were banned from the High School computers for our entire sophmore year but we were in so many computer classes they just couldn’t take us out so that “punishment” was null and void. We were just a giant cause of stress and the rule book was just getting larger and larger.
I remember me and Darin tried to start a after school computer gaming club to try and learn the Half-Life 3D Map Modeling engine to map out a model of the school using the Half-Life engine but that plan was shot down because of the violence involved in making a mod for Half-Life. Then Columbine happened and we were probably put on a watch list.
But I guess what I am trying to point out you can’t stop anyone from doing something like that if they are determined but I could outsmart any kid probably and block out their intents to blog. People are all running these linksys and netgear routers. Those are easy to login to because 98% of them I come across everything is still on default. I like my Pentium 3 700mhz Box with 12GB HDD and 64MB of RAM running Red Hat Linux 9 as my Router/Firewall/Wireless Access Point. I have complete control and can lockout everything or nothing. I don’t know many 14 year olds that like to blog and would want to try and tamper with that thing.
So don’t filter kids blogging from the school level. Let the parents talk to the kids about responsible internet use. But in this society parents actually stepping up to talk to their kids and take some action and showing them how the internet works. Probably will never happen because most adults don’t have a clue about what their kids are doing on the internet. It’s kinda amazing being able to drive around at night open up my Mac use FINK to compile Ethereal and just grab peoples Instant Messages right out the air and read them if I so choose. Most of it is pointless dribble but everyone just be careful and secure your wireless network. Or you can hire me to do it for you. =)
-Tristan
