Re:Sounds like you got out - played.. (Score 1)

First of all, I agree that parents shouldn't have to worry about their children seeing pornography in a public place like the library. I think it makes sense for libraries to take reasonable precautions to prevent this.

Surely the only real worry here is very young children seeing porn, by accident, when searching for something else innocuous. This is, I agree, a parent's nightmare scenario - the questions it will raise in a child's mind, etc etc.

But if 14-year-old Johnny is so full of passion that he feels he's going to burst if he can't ogle a really nice pair of breasts (sorry - there goes this page in most of the filter programs), then what the hell is wrong? We shouldn't be fighting to "save him" from something he desperately wants to see. If I remember rightly, there's very little a porn site can dish up which is more obscene than the dreams you start having at that age anyway :)

I mean, think about this. At least here in the UK (I believe its the same for the US), it is illegal to sell porn to anyone under 18. It's legal to have sex at 16. So for 2 years of your life, you can have sex, and watch yourself having sex in the mirror while you do it. But you can't buy or view imagery depicting the same acts.

It's natural to want to have, think about, read about and view sex from the age of about 14, so the only real problem with internet access in libraries is when the material viewed by one person affects those around him/her.

Perhaps the ultimate solution is to have private booths with unrestricted machines in them (I know, this sounds like I want them to set up an in-library peep-show, but...). Then adolescent Johnny can get his five-minute fix of breasts, and, perhaps more importantly, his worried father can check out the medical advice pages dealing with testicular cancer (not something you want other people reading over your shoulder), and no-one is worried by anyone else's exposure to the viewed material.

The hardest part of getting this measure introduced would be establishing the age at which 'children' are allowed to use the 'private' machines by themselves. I would argue for an age of either 12 or 13 - I imagine a lot of "family associations" would probably prefer you to be drawing a pension before being allowed in.

As for younger children, perhaps the best solution is to build a custom, US Libraries kid-friendly system, based on something like the directory index at Yahoo!, and served in the usual way (ie, as a proxy which only allows pages in the index to be served).

Yes, it means that those under, say 12, will not have full access to the net when on their own. But they will have a wide-reaching and pretty comprehensive set of sites to begin exploring the web with, and if there are 'unrestricted' machines in the building (in my little booths :-), then the librarian, or their parents can always allow them further access under supervision, to find what they need.

If the index is compiled by a variety of independent groups, and copies of it stored in paper form, on CD-ROMS, or some other way in which it is viewable by (and those who compile accountable to) parents and other library users, its probably the best solution we can hope for. I can't believe it will cost much more than paying SurfWatch or anyone else for their piece-of-crap software, either!