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Metered HTTP Proxy?
Jon asks: "My brother-in-law has three teenage daughters. The only thing that he has to hold over their head is being online. I am trying to find him an HTTP proxy server that has metering built in. I started with Squid which has the authentication stuff in it but we would like something where we could allocate minutes, like some of the WiFi stuff you encounter at a hot spot."
My requirements:
- need to be able to limit each daughter to e.g. 1Gb of traffic. Once they hit that, bzzt, no more Internet access till next month. After that, they can either experience the joys of 28kb/s downloading or grovel at someone's feet to let them browse under another login id
- each daughter needs to be able to check how much Internet "allowance" she has left
- need to be able to limit use to a specific period of the day. With holidays coming up, I don't want them to be sitting in their rooms all day chatting... Ideally, I'd be able to block out individual sites (e.g. MSN) while leaving other stuff untouched
- need to be able to block out the most noxious sites. For some reason, teenage girls can't seem to resist downloading crapware if it calls itself "PicOfGoodCharlotte.exe" or something similar...
Yep, I'm aware that I could set up something that does most/all of this, but frankly there's not enough hours in the day at present to do so.
Good point, actually--you don't even need a good blocking system; just dump a couple of manuals in their room, or at least a Linux/FreeBSD installation CD with a post-it note saying "THE MANUALS ARE IN /USR/SHARE/DOC" and let them figure it out from there. Let them do their homework on a stripped-down Winblows box without a network card; I'm sure the PCs at their local library will give them the net access they need for research on school projects.
You wouldn't literally be forcing them to code something up from binary, but they might actually learn something in the process. As in "You wanted a car. Here's a 1974 Monte Carlo. It's not running. Here's the Time-Life book of the family car and a toolkit, have fun. Oh, and don't forget that you'll need gas & insurance money."
As for having Internet access as the only means of control over your kids, I don't have any myself but ffs, that makes about as little sense as anything I've ever heard about child psychology.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
So please enlighten us. How is limiting access to the internet to a reasonable amount of time (depending on the PARENT's standards/values/beliefs) not treating them like human beings?
You're not in the right mindset to respond to this guy's post. When he says that the children should be treated like human beings, he's really saying, ``what right do you have to oppress these people?'' While anyone sane knows that it's a parent's job to raise their children correctly, eric.t.f.bat doesn't see it so. In his mind, and the minds of people like him, it's a parent's job to provide for Child-X's welfare until he/she/it reaches the age where he/she/it is self sufficient. Children raised in such an environment are supposed to have no sense of family, as ties to people are places are utterly arbitrary. The child's alligiance should be either to himself or to the entire human race, depending on what kind of indoctrination he was given.
I'm going to curb them if they start going down a path I disagree strongly with
Under his mindset, you don't have this right. Your child (or more properly, the child you're raising) is your equal in the world, and nobody has the right to oppress another person.
In his world, a Socialized boarding school would serve just as well as arbitrary parents, and I personally like his mindset because it leads to people that I don't have to worry about competing with for scarse resources.
I can kind of see your point - you're saying that it is better that a kid has the ability to break the rules without actually being limited to following the rules. That kind of makes sense.
So the follow up question is ... exactly as the original question, except that rather than limiting, just tallying and reporting?
Note that part of a parent's job is to socialise their child(ren) as to how the world works. Since it was originally pointed out how some WiFi hotspots already do this, then that's how the world works, and the kids need to learn this. Also, an employer may have net access - but may monitor their employee's net usage. Regardless of whether this crowd agrees with the employer in doing so or not, it's still the way the world works, and you'll need to learn how to work within it or you'll be out of a job. (Much better to leave employment on your own terms when you have a new job than to be fired and be without paycheck for a while...)