A Parent's Guide To Linux Web Filtering

Roblimo writes "Not all parents want their children exposed to everything on the Internet, especially porn. So far, virtually all home-level Net filtering software has been for Windows. This tutorial on NewsForge, by Joe Bolin, shows Linux-using parents how to set up Web filtering for *their* children -- and shows them how to customize filters to fit their own tastes and beliefs instead of relying on a commercial software company's ideas of 'good' and 'bad,' too."

Comments

Excellent

[ReverendHoss]

The easier and more accurate it is for parents to filter content for their own children, based on their own values, the less likely it is for them to scream for the government to do it for them.

Re:Excellent

[stienman]

Actually I doubt this will make much of a difference at all.

Even if they are always around to protect their kids parents still demand that 'public' places be free of anything that could harm their children. The internet is often seen as a public place. Unless the 'magazine racks' are covered and the 'bars' are closed to anyone under a certian age they will feel that the government should step in an ensure that these steps are taken. This doesn't even touch problems with identity, stalking, etc.

This is not a terrible thing. It is a new responsibility that parents have had to adjust to in the last decade. Any reasonable step that can be enacted with little cost that does not prevent another's right to use the internet should be enacted.

The 'internet' is still in a state of tremendous change. There is no way that a reasonable response can be created that will stand the test of time. Any response now will fall far short of the ideal. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. As we develop new techniques to match the internet's development we'll learn valuable lessens.

It's not much different than spam. Techniques come, are honed, changed, and then go. We all expect (and know) that eventually the tide will turn and spam will be managed effectively. Similarily, we all know and expect that certian regulations will be set in place that will make it difficult for minors to open themselves to crimes of opportunity or exposure to things which the law currently says should be restricted to adults (or to minors only under adult supervision).

This article is good for the tech savvy parent, but it certianly will not affect the majority opinion.

-Adam

Re:Excellent

[Safety Cap]

Even if they are always around to protect their kids parents still demand that 'public' places be free of anything that could harm their children.

This is exactly why they will end up with weak offspring that will be killed in the first round of purges.

Pediatricians usually recommend one have furry pets and send one's kids to day care, pre-school so the little tykes actually get sick and build up their immune system. The offspring of the parents who use those "antibacterial" wipes and soaps are the ones who will die in the first wave of plagues.

This brings us to environment. Only by exposing one's kids to life in the real world (of which, Teletubbies and Barney are only a small part), can those kids grow up strong and able to deal with life outside the Master Planned Community, lest they be killed in the waves of immigrations that overrun the MPCs.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't tell you how to raise your children; why do you think you have the right to tell me how to raise mine?

Well, your kids have a few rights, like the right to a decent education, to not be neglected etc. If you're going to provide a decent balanced educational program for your kids, that's fine. The state should satisfy itself that you are doing so in the same way that it satisfies itself that your kids aren't neglected, or that you don't beat your wife - ie. it does nothing unless someone complains.

If you can't provide a decent education (because you don't have the skills or knowledge, or becaus eyou don't have the time) then you'll have to avail yourself of the state facility that is provided for you.

Re:Excellent

[orthogonal]

What are your values? Free porn for all kids? There are legitimate reasons to agree as a society that kids viewing porn is not a good thing. The government frequently passes laws restricting behavior of children in the interests of protecting them. (mandatory bike helmets, can't buy beer until you're 21, ban Joe Camel ads, etc.)

Well, perhaps there are legitimate reasons to keep kids from porn.

But there are certainly legitimate reasons to insist that parents are responsible to monitor their children's use of the internet and not expect the nanny-State to do it for them.

There's no mechanism for keeping porn form kids that doesn't involve the government judging content and registering that content or its viewers, or both.

And there is a chilling effect on free speech if one has to get government permission before distributing content or fear government prosecution afterwards. The cure is worse than the disease.

Let's recall the various works banned by the U.S. Government for "obscenity"; DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, James Joyce's Ulysses -- and even Voltaire's political/religious satire Candide -- all were banned from the United States by U.S. customs inspectors. And all, of course, are now considered classic works of literary art.

And as I noted previously, there is plenty of stuff on the internet that, while not obscene, probably shouldn't be viewed by children. Will you ban pictures of the Nazi Holocaust in your attempt to make the internet safe for children?

And the whole "for the children" argument is a straw-man, set up by fundamentalists who are using "the children" as an excuse to keep porn from adults by banning porn altogether.

Sorry -- there are many good things in this world that it's not at all good to expect the government to provide.

Health care is a good, and I suspect that many parents would desire free health care for their kids even more than government suppression of porn. Little Johnny will recover from seeing a "beaver shot" a lot more easily than he'll recover from leukemia.

But the same fundamentalist conservatives who swear up and down that it will be positively disastrous for government to get in the universal health care business -- even just for kids --, advocate government telling us what we can and cannot view -- for the benefit of "the children".

The same conservatives who explain that government regulation of business stifles innovation and creates a drag on the economy, want to regulate the 50 billion dollar porn industry out of business -- even though by far the vast majority of porn customers are adults.

The same conservatives who rail against "Big Government" apparently don't think it's too much for government to vet every one of million of web pages?

Please: the same fundamentalists who preach about "personal responsibility" every time they want to cut a welfare program or unemployment benefits, can't ask a middle-class parent able to afford a computer and an internet connection to watch what sites his kids visit?

Re:Excellent

[the_mad_poster]

And as a society, we do have the right to tell you how to raise your children. It is not just the family that raises the children, but the whole village.

Ummmmm. No.

We have the responsibility to protect your children from you, if necessary, the same way we have the responsibility to protect anyone else who needs it. We do not have the right, nor the responsibility, nor, for most of us, the inclination to tell you how to raise your children.

An excellent example of that is the recent decision that government can not, in fact, meddle in the affairs of parents who send their children to juvenile nudist camps. Of course, if they were sending them off to brothels, that would be a different story, and we would be obliged to step in and stop them because it would, in theory, be possible to show that such action is harmful.

The idea that I have either the right or the implied responsibility to assist other people in raising their children without an explicit request to do so is ridiculous.

Re:Excellent

[v01d]

When a kid is in fifth grade, that is not the time to be questioning authority. Questioning authority at that age is just being disrepectful to your elders.

Respect is earned. If my daughters's teacher is a complete idiot, I will tell them so.

My sister's third grade teacher told the class that red headed children aren't as smart. If you silently accept that from a teacher you are a pathetic excuse for a parent, and are doing a disservice to your child.

Kids need to respect thier teachers.

Teachers need to earn that respect. I have rarely seen a respectable teacher not get the respect they deserve.

Nice one!

[Grell]

This could really help push Linux for schools and libraries. (who don't need the extra expense of the "secure" kiosk's their paying for now.)

~G

Actually, it doesn't.

[Fooby]

The article only tells how to install iptables, squid, and Dan's Guardian. It doesn't tell how to customize it to your own tastes or values. Here, in full, is all the article says about customizing the filter:

While Dan's Guardian provides an excellent filter all by itself, you may want to exercise further control over the Web filtering by editing the other files in the /etc/dansguardian directory that contain external blacklists. Blacklists from squidGuard and URLBlacklist work perfectly with Dan's Guardian. Each file contains a brief explanation for its contents to make configuration easier.

So what we have is a case of relying on "Dan's" ideas of good and bad, rather than a commercial company's. Not a huge improvement on the face of it if parents are just going to install an open-source tool rather than a commercial one. Better yet would be to educate the kids and monitor their behavior rather than trusting some blanket censorship tool, open-source or not.

I don't know that this will work ...

[petabyte]

Frankly, you're not going to beat sitting down with your kids and talking to them about where to go on the net and where not to. I mean this software helps but isn't that hard to get around. All the kid really has to do is boot the system with knoppix or root the box. Some people might laugh at that notion but think of what you would do at this age. Most linux people have that sort of "I want to do this just because I can" mentality. If that gene has passed on, you'll need a little more than iptables. :)

When I was 10, my dad had a net-nanny type program on the machine allegedly to protect my younger brother. It timed internet access and cut you off after a certain period. So I opened up regedit and ripped the program out manually. Sure, the system was barely functional, the network connection didn't work at all and the machine needed to be reinstalled - but that nanny software never came back.

Re:Why Censor?

[jawtheshark]

I'm not a parent... So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I have been on the internet for 10 years. Back then I was 17, which means I was not really a child. However one thing I learned quite quickly is that you have to search for porn/hatespeech/$fill_in_gross_stuff. Yes, I know rotten.com and I have visited it. Stuff there was quite a curiosity the first time I saw it.

Now, 10 years ago there was a child in this house. My sister. She was 12 back then. I did not once see anything questionable on her screen, nor in her browser cache (I used to monitor her stuff as a worried brother, my parents couldn't have done it) This means: if your kids go and visit those sites they have searched for it, or got the link from a friend. In the latter case you can be pretty sure they that they would have gotten the information anyways. I mean: how hard is it to go over to your friends place and ask him/her to show the site that you couldn't visit at home.

So, if I'm ever a parent, I'll just make sure to monitor what my kids do and not block their access. If I catch them doing something I can't condone then it'll just be time for a little chat.

It's all pretty subjective.

[Gordonjcp]

I grew up in a farming community. Around farms. Farms with stupid people and dangerous machinery on them. Trust me, I saw far more horrible things than rotten.com nearly every week.

I honestly don't see what the problem is. Although my world view has changed somewhat over the years, I don't *think* I react that differently to things now as to how I reacted when I was, say, 12 years old.

Bayesian Filters Applied to Web Content

[nullspace]

Has anyone applied a Bayesian filter to web content? This would be an interesting way to give the filter a set of initial conditions from which it could derive an ever-increasing better filtration of content based off the parent's initial criteria.

If there is a pre-existing application, I would interested to know.

Let the kids setup the filter

[bl8n8r]

What I've done in the past is setup linux boxes for people with all outgoing access closed - with a script, the user entered the address they want to connect to (disney.com). The script then logs this, and allows outgoing access to the sight. This way, there isn't a lot of pre-setup stuff to do. With everyone understanding the usage is logged, it keeps them honest. Mom and dad can checkout the log with a web browser. Submitting content took some work to get figured out.... Not a perfect system, just a little different.

Helicopter parents

[FerretFrottage]

My wife (OMG, ./er who is married) calls these parents "Helicopter Parents" because they just hover over their kids, but as soon as there is an incident with regards to the child and the school and/or teacher, they immediately fly on in assuming that they (the school/teacher) are the cause of the "accident". It's sad when my wife is surprised that the parent(s) supports the teacher's or school's position. She actually got offered $5k by a parent to pass her child so that they could get the kid out of the house (this was in the affluent Plano west high school). She turned it down which is probably why she's a teacher and I'm not...I'd take the $5k and still fail the dumba$$

Re:Why filter?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I can't personally understand why parents want to filter the internet for their children

Well, I am a parent and the reasons are not always what you'd think. First, note that my 3 year-old doesn't do any more with our computers than type his name and those of his friends (hey, it makes him happy :-) Even so, his mother and I have already agreed that when he needs a computer, it will be in plain sight so we can occasionally glance over at what he's doing. I personally don't think filtering is worth the effort.

That said, children vary in their responses to different things. I tried watching Miyazaki's Spirited Away with him. Yeah, I read the "scary for kids" warning, but I figured I'd gauge his response to it. He was terrified. By what you ask? The scene where the child's parents turn into pigs. He's not afraid of pigs, he thinks they're funny. But he was terrified that his mother and I might turn into pigs like in the movie. Make sense? No, but he's three years old!

In real life, we already have issues with him being influenced by kids whose parents (if you can call them that) apparently have wildly different ideas about childrearing than we. So he already knows a few words he we don't want him using and has made a few statements that would be pretty nerve-wracking if he actually knew what they meant. We can handle stuff like this because it's out front. If he were learning this stuff online it would be much more difficult to figure out the source and decide how to handle it.

Most parents' response to the net is similar to how they view books or movies: I don't want my son watching "Saving Private Ryan" for quite a while because I know how many nightmares he'll have. But if he happens to see the occasional bare tit on TV, no big deal. He'll just giggle and forget about it.

The fundamental issue is that of not exposing a child to material that he's not yet ready for. And this decision should rest solely with the parent. Our job's hard enough as it is; for those who want to use it, filtering is just one more tool.

Another perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the posters seem to be parents here, so I'll give another perspective - the childs. I'm nearly 17, and I've had fairly unrestricted access to the internet for, hmm, probably about 5 years and used it a little before then. I've read and seen things on the internet that could be grouped into pretty much every category conceivable, and guess what? It hasn't done me any harm at all. In fact, I'd agree with the people who say it prepares you for the real world that little bit more. I don't have urges to rip my ass cheeks apart, drive around in a bangbus, or hate black people. My parents set a few (fairly unrestrictive) rules about my internet usage, and as long as I behave in a reasonably acceptable way in general, they won't have any reason to look at internet usage or anything else.