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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."
Why do you actually "need" this? Would your life be so much worse if you just let them use the Internet however they wanted?
Hmm, when I was a kid, I could spend roughly as much as 12 hours a day using the computer. I used BBSs, logged into local PDP-11's and Unix systems, and used things like Gopher and early renditions of IRC. Sometimes I'd be at it for up to 16 hours.
I also played games on my computer that involved lots of thinking- adventure games from Sierra and LucasArts and Infocom. I wrote programs, my own games, and learned about the operating systems.
This activity had a horrible horrible effect on me. I sure wish my parents had done something to stop me from spending all that time and directed me to try to be a sports star or more athletic. Because now I appear to have trouble keeping a job- for instance, I worked as a game developer, then a game integration engineer, and then a director of software development for a game company, and then Vice President of a medium sized company I helped found, and then CTO of yet another company. And now I have all these problems- like which car do I drive to work, and do I want to hang out in my own theater room, or do I want to spend some time practicing on my expensive drumset in my recording studio or spend time in the flower garden with my Scandenavian wife. I sometimes have to walk up many steps and through lots of hallways to find my wife because my house is just too big and I can't be heard by shouting. Sometimes I spend hours worrying about whether I should vacation on an exclusive beach resort on a remote carribean Island reachable only by boat, or whether I should spend my time at the mountain cabin skiing and sipping 25 year old scotch by the fire. And the worst part is that I simply can't find enough time to play the new computer games anymore- I always have someone calling me for business or have to take trips to Europe. I just wish my parents had put a timer on my computer and limited it to 1 hour a day so I could do the same job my father did- work on an assembly line and have a small house and collect public assistance when the work damages my back and I can't support my family for a period. If only they had nudged me in the "right" direction- I would have none of these worries!
So please, please stop your kids from making the mistakes my parents made. I should have had some limits imposed. I should have had been more like my father and go hunting, watch sports, and work on the assembly line until my back is damaged, and then collect welfare to help feed my family. But now my life is cursed and I owe it all to bad parenting by my parents. Please heed Adam's advice and keep your kids away from the higher tax brackets...its just horrific.
This has been the truth about my life and its not boasting. If your child finds something they like, let them hone their skills at it for as long as they like. Eventually they will tire of it or move into a different phase in their life. If they don't, they might just turn out like me and have some bit of talent that was developed because they were allowed to pursue their own path rather than the one their control-freak parents would have chosen for them.
I'm not saying all kids who play doom for 8 hours a day are going to start their own companies. But if you find them exploring different programs and trying all sorts of things on the internet, don't try to slow them down with your own limits. Just because you don't get it doesn't mean its not good for them in the long run. Often your kids are going to be smarter than you.