I was so happy to read a post written at Strollerderby called MySpace Tries To Clean Up For The Kids. I am right in the middle of the whole MySpace chatting thing with my 15 year old. While I understand how much fun this can be, I also know the dangers involved.
I am sure that most of you have heard the awful story about the teenager that committed suicide because of a joke that was played on her. That girl lives in the same town as I do so it feels much more real. I don’t want this to happen to my family.
Though I am still skeptical of MySpace, I am glad they are finally taking some steps to help our kids stay safe…..
"Letting parent submit a list of their kids’ email addresses to MySpace
so that if the kid tries to create a profile there they are turned
down. Except, uh, a kid can create a new email address in like 20
seconds. Brilliant, MySpace!"
I am not sure if the other things they are going to do will work but at least they are trying. If anyone out there has any good tips that they use at home, we would love to hear it. Every little tip helps.
I am too dolphin. Thanks for the tips.
If you goal is outright prohibition, you could edit your hosts file to redirect myspace's website to your localhost. Just add the following to your hosts file:
127.0.0.1 myspace.com
127.0.0.1 http://www.myspace.com
Your hosts file is in windowssystems32driversetc for WinXP users and /private/etc/ for Mac OSX (you can google the lcoation if you use a different operating system.
Now that won't stop a determined child from using a web proxy or something, but it should put a halt to the average user being able to access MySpace.
All that said, I'm more in favor of close monitoring than outright prohibition.