quote- "It’s the government’s job to educate the kids" 

No it isn't. Educating a child is the job of the parents, and no one else. The government is responsible for teaching the child knowledge, not bringing him or her up."

erm, dictionary definition of educate is:-
1. to develop the faculties and powers of (a person) by teaching, instruction, or schooling. 
2. to qualify by instruction or training for a particular calling, practice, etc.; train: to educate someone for law. 
3. to provide schooling or training for; send to school. 

or in your own words 'teaching the child knowledge'. 

I think you're getting confused with educating a child and raising them.

"It’s the government’s job to educate the kids"

No it isn't. Educating a child is the job of the parents, and no one else. The government is responsible for teaching the child knowledge, not bringing him or her up.
But I agree that nowadays, with the gradual disappearance of the definition of education from the collective mind, it most probably falls to the government to do both educating and teaching.

WOW, after a long time an article which is well balanced less on sarcasm and heavy on good content....
Well done

A friend of mine recently bought a HP PC running Vista from Staples. Sure enough he got a 60 day trial of Norton Internet Security. Not only did it not work out of the box, Windows Defender also won't update. How many non computer literate people are going to get caught out on things like this?

Where it comes to putting a computer in the kids room, if parents are that worried, just don't give the kids internet access in their room. Thats what I've done, I build up a PC out of spare bits for my kids who are 7 and 5. They don't have internet access on the PC, just a basic installation of Ubuntu 7.10 with things like Tuxpaint and GCompris. They're happy drawing pictures in Tuxpaint and don't even ask about using the CBeebies web site.

When they're a bit older I will maybe allow them some sort of restricted internet access with something like Dansguardian on my home server.

Rob

Spot on, of course these days personal reponsibility is a matter of everyone else's concern. So thats alright then eh!

*has never spent my own money in PC world*

What about routers with long logs, age restrictions and time of day blocking? I think that if the routers were restricted then it could make it much easier to block what they access.

I think stopping it at the internet gateway of the home is an easier solution. There may be several pc's in the home, and I'm guessing a simple way around is to fit an extra hard disk with OS and select that to boot from using the BIOS, in order to avoid netnanny stuff on original drive.

A router would prevent that.

Also, mobile phones are becoming better at browsing using WiFi, so again stopping it at the router makes more sense.

It's a great sales opportunity for the manufacturers, family friendly routers providing total control of what your family can see, and when.

However, would you really want to see what sort of stuff your kids are looking at if shocks you?

I remember my Mum finding porn under my brother's bed, ha ha ha.

Didn't vista have a bundled net nanny?
Oh and I think you'll find that kids are pretty grossed out by much of the online sex and avoid it themselves if given the choice.
Perhaps some of us are projecting too much?

In fact many adults are grossed out by much of the online sex available I dare to claim.

Great article. Straight to the point. I think parents are simply too lazy to worry about it.

...I would load a Linux LiveCD up and edit the filesystem until it was all gone. Then I would use Linux anyway. That's what I did on my school computers.

This kind of software is unnecessary if the parents teach their children to be responsible on the internet. Despite the above comment, I would never go on illegal/questionable websites because my parents taught me not to.

Well written.

To add, i've never seen any parental control software that a half competent child can't crack or just guess their parents password.

Even then a smart kid would just press F10 (or what ever the key is that activates the restore partition) restore the computer to factory settings and disable the software

Truly it is unfortunate that the "morons" are allowed to breed.