I had a comment today from one of our readers Jeff Rebarcak on my post regarding the dangers of pornography:
Michael & Amy! Thank you so much for this last post. It came with perfect timing for me. I walked into my home office a couple of days ago to hang with my six year old son who was playing “Play House Disney”. Some how he had gotten on a porn site and was just looking at the picture that jumped up on the screen. I obviously had a bunch of questions to field! Thanks for the info on Covenant Eyes…I’m glad you’re now an affiliate!
This advice is for Jeff, and anyone else with children, get Apple computers for your family. In my humble opinion, Apple is by far the best computer for keeping your kids safe from predatory porn sites (which means that they purposefully buy URL’s that are commonly misspelled words of popular kids sites). The reason I love Apple so much is that you can easily create separate user accounts for yourself and your children. There is an easy feature on all macs that allows you to automatically log yourself out when you’ve been away from the computer.
So if your kid comes by and wants to go online, they have to have their own account and password to get on the computer. Now here is the awesome part of the Apple parental control features that come standard in any new mac or any of the Mac OS X operating systems, you can block all sites that are not already on your child’s bookmark list. When you turn on the parental control features for your child’s account, you are telling the computer that your kid can only visit sites that you have already pre-approved. The only thing you need to do to pre-approve a site is to simply add the site to their bookmarks in Safari. To add a site to their bookmarks, you will need your account user name and password. So kids can’t add them by themselves, they need you to do it for them.
The reason this is such a great system for keeping kids safe online is that there are no accidental mistypes that get them to a porn site. The only sites they can visit are ones that you’ve already approved! It is quite simple and brilliant. Filtering just doesn’t work in my opinion because it is way too complicated. Trust me, it is not a hassle to add new sites for your kids because you know they are safe when surfing online.
Visit Apple.com to find out more information about the parental control features on all macs (the link is http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/parentalcontrols.html). Apple would be smart to promote this feature more prominantly in their commercials and print advertising.
Michael & Amy! You should be an affiliate with Apple because my wife immediately used the link you provided and is getting an Apple! I'm a little to "chicken" to switch from my PC but I'm sure my family will win me over.
Thanks for looking out for the family. I just discovered your site/ministry and I'm soaking everything up. I'm certainly going to tell my friends and contacts that they need to tune in. God bess you!
Jeff Rebarcak
This is available in the non-business versions of Vista as well, including controls on what programs can be run.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/parental-controls.aspx
Thanks for the link Michael Blake. Have you used the parental control features in Vista yet? I know that I had a Vista machine when it first came out and was very frustrated trying to get the accounts working and the parental controls. But maybe they've gotten better since then =]
I have to admit that I haven't used Vistas controls, my boys have laptops running Linux that aren't connected to the internet. My oldest turns 12 this summer and I was planning on setting it up at that time.
I do have Windows Live Family Safety running on my laptop in case someone finds it logged in and takes the opportunity to go online, I have it set to block adult content and log all online activity. You can also set it to block all sites that aren't child friendly or on your list of approved sites.
I also have an Apple for our 4 year old. He loves it. We whitelist specific sits and leave all the others blocked. Works great!
Such user accounts has been a basic feature of windows for the last decade. I was hoping for legitimate and compelling reason supported by technical facts to make the switch to apple for kids.