Hmm.. Yes, I hear this all the time. My classmates at school have web filters on their systems and they're sooo pissed off that they can't access their 'h0t pr0n'. I'm almost 16 years old, but I actually know **something** about computers unlike the clowns who went to some random privacy confrence to bitch about their parents using an internet filter. First of all, I would like to say that I learned everything that I have by myself. I had no one else to teach me C, C++, HTML, assembler, or any other programming language I know. My parents trust me unlike some it seems. It seems proportional that the more parents mistrust their kids and try to limit their activities, the more ignorant they are about anything/everything. The way I got started, honestly was through piracy. I was doing that before I was even 12 and didn't screw my parent's system up. I mainly just downloaded stuff to see how it worked or just for the thrill of it. Note that I did not cause any trouble over this, such as getting lawsuits from the RIAA since I was smart enough to not use kazaa unlike most of the people in my neighborhood. Note to moral/legal sissies: no one I know who has half a brain about programming has NOT pirated software. But after a while, I got into programming with C and installed my first linux distribution when I was in 5th grade, using Redhat 7.2. Fastfoward a few years later and I have gentoo up and running on all my systems, have been to 3 hacker confrences - one of them alone in the hotel - and have a good command of a few programming languages, along with in depth knowledge of the Linux kernel. Not to mention, I'm the only person around my age, except for one, that knows how a buffer overflow or heap overflow works at the hardware level, knows what a file descriptor is, or the first thing about writing shellcode. I have not used any of my knowledge for malicious purposes. The main thing I am trying to point out is by keeping your kids 'protected' from the web, you are hindering their ability to learn. I was not taught any of my knowledge in school and know for a fact that if you teach something to yourself, you will always remember it better than if some instructor/'mentor' teaches you. Not to mention, finding the information is half the fun. I know that some kids are complete idiots and need to have some sense beaten into them with a large hammer (if so, you have better things to worry about), but as a whole, you are hindering the intellectual development of your kid if you are actively forcing your way into every single nook and cranny of what he/she does online. Maybe I've just always been a bit paranoid, but I can never remember giving out my password to anyone, putting my real name on a website, let alone telling anyone my real name online without knowing them for a long enough time that I would trust them. I've met a lot of people, most way older than me, and I can honestly say that nothing bad has *ever* come out of these relationships. Tell your kid to emerge (or if he's running on debian - apt-get :) some common sense. Its worked well for me so far.

PS: To any kid who spoke at the afformentioned privacy confrence: USING A BLOG DOES NOT MAKE YOU COMPUTER LITERATE, NOR DOES USING AIM!!! If you're so damned paranoid about your parents 'finding out what you do online' then use a friggin' live cd! ISOs of them are everywhere! Oh, wait, you probably don't know what ISOs are! PHLACK has a desktop=sneaky feature so your parents wouldn't even know you were using a different OS. Hell, if you have one of those, just remove your stupid web filtering program (unleess of course, you have NTFS on there, but then you can just edit the registry to remove it from startup) and have fun with your 'h0t phr33 xxx passwordz'.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/10940/31538#31538