Forgot this classic scenario:
Cool, now that I got limewire, I can download some fall out boy and panic at the disco songs! ...oh. This is a lady having sex with a dog. Just gonna... Delete this
Bonus: time to go to poptarts .com and design the new poptart!!! Oh a popup. Hey dad what is a "fat juicy cock"?
Why do you think people were panicking at the disco
That lady is why
Yeah...
I should not have had access to 4chan in the year of our lord 2000 when I was a child
Yet my parents wouldn't let me play Doom cause it was too violent
Huh. I remember it as being earlier, like slightly later than but basically contemporaneous with goatse.cx. But I guess the 2000s blur together a bit for me. But looking up articles on it, you're clearly right.
Way after goatse, you may have seen goatse later
I remember when 2 girls 1 cup came out because I was old and wise enough to respond to the curiosity with "no yeah seems like people are really disturbed by whatever that is, I don't need to watch it."
I was old enough to ignore that but people watched it on a laptop in the smoking section at my college so I saw it there.
One time when I was a kid, my dad was hanging out with his friends downstairs and I was with my sister because I didn’t have any friends or anything else to do. I was sitting there eating an apple when my sister opened up some page that was either bright green or pink like early 2000s HTML sites, and there was a picture of some dismembered woman inside a plastic tub filled with blood
She turned to me and said something but I don’t remember what then she just goes back to reading the text on the page. I just sat there with my apple staring at the picture and picking at the sticker on my apple in silence
:omori-afraid:
When I was about 8, I thought the word "butt" was hilarious. So I went to butt . com. And... yeah.
Research for some of my sixth grade reports consisted of typing in random urls on the topic hoping one would be relevant to the topic
One of them was!!
The internet really did feel like magic back then. Type in a url and, like, sometimes get access to a relevant site you've never heard of. That just isn't how it's done anymore.
How do parents even handle kids' internet access now? Do they just let them do whatever or have kid filters on all over the place (that the kids probably get around anyway)?
I'm not sure kids (and regular non-tech-savvy people in general) even really "browse" the internet in this fashion anymore - they just stick to a small set of sites (and apps on their phones), like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other big platforms like that, and very rarely go outside of them. So you have filters in the sense that these platforms are ostensibly moderated, but a lot of parents don't really pay much attention, which is how you get various incidents where kids are left to just fuck around on their phones and tablets with no supervision for hours, and end up spending hundreds of dollars on microtransactions in some shitty mobile game, without understanding what they're doing.
If you know what you're doing you can lock down a phone's ability to do anything without a parent's password - but then again if the kid knows what they're doing they can factory reset the phone and disable that stuff.
You can go the DARE route and try to scare them but it won’t work. You can wait until they’re in college to give them their own devices lol.
There needs to be some security feature that looks like the internet is broken or gives some 404 error. Right now every filter tool I can think of will explicitly state the brand of the software or have some warning message which makes it easier to go around. If you have a generic “unable to connect” message then it would be almost impossible for the kid to diagnose the problem and they’ll just have to rely on random proxy sites which ideally wouldn’t work either
My moms manage my younger siblings at the access level. Screen time is limited to a couple hours per day max, no creating social media accounts, parental controls activated on all devices (so no adding apps or visiting websites that a parent hasn't greenlit). I'm sure a sufficiently motivated and computer-minded kid could get past all of this (I did when my mom tried it on me as a teen lmao) but none of my siblings are really interested in computers at all beyond watching Kids Youtube / Netflix and texting friends so their system has never truly been tested.
I’m sure a sufficiently motivated and computer-minded kid
then its a learning experience for them, plus side