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How To Configure Real PC Parental Controls?
Orange Crush writes "As the resident computer geek in an office full of accountants, my boss recently asked me how she could reasonably keep her teenage son from using the family computer to 'access inappropriate sites.' I of course responded 'Give up now. There's nothing in this world that can keep a determined teenager from acquiring porn.' Sadly, she was dissatisfied with this answer. I mentioned that there was in fact software available for this purpose, but that all of it was trivially easy to bypass for a clever young mind. I really can't think of another answer. She could password protect the BIOS to prevent booting a different OS, but that's easily defeated with a screwdriver at most. The only solutions I can think of involve upstream firewalls/proxies/etc to which I gleefully redirected her to her ISPs tech support number. As much as I disagree with her reasoning — and ignoring the obvious 'go to a friend's house' loophole — is there really any other way (on a home budget) to netnanny a household computer?"
Covenant Eyes software is actually pretty good. It doesnt block but it sends your "accoutability" partner an email report of sites visited.
Move to china they are good with censorship :)
Seriously, what is she really worried about? Is she questioning her job as a parent and worried the big, bad internet is going to so corrupt her son that all of the important life lessons she has imparted will be pushed aside?
to suck your dick, and film it. Sprinkle liberally around the intertubes. That way, when her kid goes looking for porn, (s)he is scarred for life.
If the son has a decent knowledge of computing, there's really nothing that can be done.
My opinion is that she should just approach her son and talk to him frankly about any issues that she's concerned about.
Take away the video card so Jr can't see the hot action? Or sit there with the computer so Jr can be monitored at all times. Cancel internet access. Encrypt the hard drive so that Jr can't use the computer at all. Put a picture of Jesus over the monitor.
Poke out his eyes, problem sovled
Why waste time looking for a more sophisticated solution to a problem that is misunderstood by your boss anyway? Just get one of off-the-shelf filtering solutions and let the teenager bypass it if he is smart and determined enough to install Firefox.
I shudder at the lack of trust between this young man and his mother though. If it is justified, he will probably end up in jail once he turns 18 and can no longer be legally restrained.
At my house, all outgoing traffic passes through an OpenWRT firewall, which redirects all web traffic to my caching proxy. It logs all accesses. I get reports. If I see something "unusual", I bring my kids in and have them explain it. I TALK TO THEM. It's useless to try to mechanically block their access, but if they know that EVERYTHING they do IS monitored (and they do), they seem to act responsibly.
Technology is not a substitute for good parenting, but it can be a useful tool for it.
Simple, don't have internet access at home. Remove the power supplies/batteries from all computers when you leave. Keep your credit card numbers secret and the cards themselves on your person at all times. That should solve the issue of accessing inappropriate material at home.
If a minor is involved, parents have a right to set limits.
Can he get around them? Most likely.
Does that absolve her of responsibility. No.
Put the computer in a public area. Remove the ram everytime you aren't going to be in that public area. Install all the limitations you can on the user account in whatever operating system you are using so settings can't be changed and run everything through a proxy server with a filter list that is also updated from a third party service with a block list. Seriously though - this is rather extreme. How about just having the parent talk to the kid about why they think porn is bad and put the computer in a public place.
Get a web developer
I don't think anything short of good parenting will help. But, if you must, perhaps blocking in combination with monitoring might help. At the most extreme, this would mean putting in a surveillance tool (software or preferably hardware) that monitors all traffic.
I've been using this for my kids:
http://www.k9webprotection.com/
It's free and it's not (too) easily defeated. Of course the usual applies (if physical access to the machine is available, all measures are null and void in the end), but it's something at least.
Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umount;sleep
Most firewalls have hosts files on them, that can allow/deny connections. By default, deny all connections. And only allow a few specific hosts to get there. (*.google.com (might be bad, google images == easy), *.slashdot.org *.wikipedia.org for example) this way, All things are denied until given a reason. Put the brat in a locked user account, don't use 'god' as the admin/root password, and it should work well. This way the kid has to ask to use a site.
use a spoon to scoop them out
I don't have too much experience in this, but it seems there may be an option here somewhere.
Password the BIOS and put a lock on the case. Make the only boot device the hard drive. Disallow boot drive selection (if necessary). Unless he breaks the lock or the case, no way he can get around that.
Move the computer to a public location.
That way you can watch them.
God forbid you actually raise your own child.
"It's 10:00 do you know where your children are?"
That is about all I can think of that really works. The other thing I would do is to not actually block anything, but to maintain copious logs and review them regularly. I think it makes more sense to have an open frank discussion with your child than to simply block access. There will always be a loophole to blocked access, but there is no way around a parent who is genuinely interested in their child's welfare.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Put the PC in the living room.
Can't look at porn when mum can walk bye at any moment.
Is probably a worth a reference in this context:
"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem".
It's not exactly true. You can very well do so. To expect a determinable result is to court dissapointment, however.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Vista + BitLocker + Parental control?
How do you keep your children away from drugs, cursing, promiscuous activity, and other undesirable things?
You can't be with your children 24/7, and they will leave the house someday (no basement jokes needed). You need to train them to think for themselves, and how to recognize good and bad decisions before they learn the hard way.
A measure of character is how you act when nobody is watching. Do you want a child that knows he shouldn't be looking at midgets with horses porn, and keeps his own activity in check? Or do you want a child that you have to keep in check using technological measures?
I wonder if people once had the same discussion about chastity belts.....
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
When you said "Give up". If the kid is going to have access to the internet, he'll have access to pr0n, period.
Any sufficiently motivated teen will circumvent even the best system. You can try to fight human nature, but in the end you will lose.
I'd put my money on the kid ending up even more depraved as a result of such a tight parental grip.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Don't get software to block them, just get software to track where they go. And tell them about it. They'll always be able to find some porn site that doesn't get blocked, but you'll be able to tell it's porn.
They'll know that if they go to a porn site or try to disable the software, you'll know about it. Which is more of a deterent then some anonymous blocking could ever be.
-Chris
My mother is a full time baby sitter. She has some kids (ages 7 - 10) who want to use the computer.
To make matters worse, she hates the "damn machines" and doesn't know anything about them.
In comes bsafeonline http://http//bsafehome.com/
This products locks down damn near everything. You can customize almost everything, and its a bitch to bypass. Time restrictions are firm, co-ordinated to the bsafeonline clock, so changing the local time on the machine doesn't do anything.
As a service, if disabled it will force a reboot.
My mom (meaning I set it up) has it set up to e-mail her (my dad) anytime a rule is triggered.
Its a good product and very effective.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=294137&cid=20570167
The custom adbanner blocking HOSTS file there you can download can easily be adapted to a "parental control" mechanism, simply by equating pr0n sites to either 127.0.0.1, OR, 0.0.0.0 addresses inside of it using notepad.exe.
It's called being a parent - She needs to talk to her child to instill her values and beliefs in him, put the computer in a public location (ours is in the living room), and limit computer time to a "healthy" amount. (That is subjective, some people say less than an hour, some believe 20 hours per day is fine.) Other than that, you're right. A determined child will get around any restrictions - heck, it might even ENCOURAGE the behavior since it is now "off limits!"
:)
Good luck to the control freak.
Put it in a high traffic area where it is easily viewed and monitored.
How hard was that?
(and if you plan to respond with why this won't work, don't bother, I have no desire to read excuses from lazy parents)
Or she could simply be removing temptation like any proper parent should.
1) Put the machine in the living room. That'll help a little by making it easier to visually monitor.
2) dansguardian or squidproxy. Yes, proxies and filters aren't foolproof but if you're willing to at least try, it's a good way to go.
3) the obligatory -- talk to and spend time with your children...though at the teenage years, that may be more challenging.
disclaimer: I'm a clueless non-parent
PC in a common room of the house, screen facing out into the room. Knowing at any time a parent or sibling may walk past does wonders.
Next step is NoFun(tm). Kid gets caught doing someting mommy doesn't want him to, mommy takes away some priveledge.
You can't fix this with technology. Not on a home budget, anyway.
I'm not familiar with most 'parental' tools for computers, and I assume most slashdotters, with their similar disdain for such tools, won't know much about them either.
A tool that my mom used for controlling video game time for my younger sister was controlling the power cord. Hand it out when it is game time, remove it when it is time to do homework.
You could probably do something similar with the computer or modem power cable as well. Limit their time on the computer to times when you are actually around. Certainly the teenager could probably go to circuit city and buy a replacement, but if he is that untrustworthy, then you won't be able to stop him anyway. I can't think of a good solution, since there probably isn't one.
Maybe put the computer in a high traffic area... or better yet, let your son learn to moderate his activity on his own. Otherwise I shudder to think what happens when he can have porn and booze and no sense of self control.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
You could set up a LAN in your house* with all traffic going through a central server, then install filtering software on that.
The whole point is raising the bar; this is just another way to do so.
(* I know it's not you that wants it, but it's easier to phrase if I pretend that it is.)
www.k9webprotection.com is a great windows based filter. It installs as a service. If you disable the process you disable the internet (a quick reboot to fix). You can even block all internet access from, say, 10pm to 7am. It has filter over-rides, and complete logging. Best of all its free. While you could pay $30/year for contentwatch or netnanny, k9 web protection is the most fully featured freeware filter out there. Its not about free speech. The parent who is paying for the computer, and internet connection ought to be able to control what content is allowed and what is disallowed. Then when the kid goes off to college they can make their own decisions. But while porn is no good at any age, it is especially harmful to children who haven't learned to control their urges.
works for our young ones. Will need another approach when they figure out how to use the neighbor's wireless signal...
As a computer technician I'm sure you've encountered cases before where a user asks you, "How do I do thus-and-so?" when really they're looking to accomplish some goal only tangentially related to what they're asking. Maybe this is best treated as the same sort of problem.
What is the user actually trying to accomplish? Is she worried that her son will become some kind of sex fiend? It's too late -- to paraphrase a line from Buffy, even linoleum makes teenage boys think about sex. Is she concerned that he'll get bad ideas about sex from Internet porn? Maybe some sex education is needed: "Son, just so you know, real women don't like bukkake gang-bangs. They like hugs. And clitoral stimulation too, but hugs first." Does she just have moral or ethical objections to porn in general? Maybe she should be talking about her values with her son a little more.
No matter what the problem is, it's almost certainly a social and educational one, not a technical one. Deploying a technical solution is probably not the answer.
Have the only computer in the house hooked up to a 50" plasma or LCD screen in front of a window facing the street.
Seriously, this is a teenager, not a six year old. Her concern should be revolving around what her kid is actually motivated to view, because it ain't being pushed to him against his control.
But this is your boss, and not someone you want to give this lecture to. Just throw the names of some filters and/or logging spyware for corporate intranets at her, and let it go. Do not fight her battles.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
There's only really one way: install a Web proxy with filtering software on the gateway to the Internet, configure that gateway's routing tables to redirect all outbound connections to ports 80 and 443 to the gateway itself (so they'll go to the proxy) (add other ports supported by the proxy as needed), block all ports that aren't handled by the proxy (this is critical, without it the proxy can be bypassed, but it also breaks IM software and a bunch of other things), and make sure the kid has no logons whatsoever on the gateway and doesn't have any passwords to anything running on it. Oh, and make sure he doesn't have physical access to it, because if he does he'll be able to give himself a logon.
Yeah, that's a lot of work and calls for a full-time geek to install and manage it. And it'll break lots of things, and require constant maintenance of the filtering software to update it for new sites and problems. And you'll find the filtering software misses 50% of what you want it to block and blocks a goodly percentage of things you don't want it to. And the kid can take a laptop down to the local coffee-shop and browse porn to his heart's content anyway.
After a lot of scouting around just to have anything that works to do minimally invasive net content filtering for a reasonable cost, I came up with the Linksys WRT54GS router (review) and their Parental Controls service. Not by any means perfect, but most of the time, it does the job and works on ALL the connected computers, you just define different users. It is not ideal for households where everyone shares the same computer. What it's best at is cutting off services at certain times of day. You can configure the filtering and then largely set and forget it, although you need to err on the lax side unless you always want to be overriding the controls. For whatever reason, Linksys doesn't really advertise this service very much, despite being one of the more cost effective options out there. For this reason, I am always thinking that they are going to discontinue the service, but they haven't (and I've had it for a couple of years now). The fact that it is administrated through the router is a big plus, comparable to corporate solutions costing much, much more.
The absolute solution to this, easy Put the computer in the living room or somewhere where he can't hide what the kids doing. There's no way the teen can get around that. Thats the most effective and costless solution.
Then, make certain there's only an ability to use it when there are adults around - in this case the parent.
Almost all social issues that parents don't want kids involved in are practiced solely away from the parent's eyes. This is one of the reasons that I'm adamant to make my home as enjoyable for my kids as possible without going across any of my own boundaries - if their friends only want to be here, then it makes my job orders of magnitude easier to know what my kids are getting themselves into.
Since we homeschool our kids, their use of the computer isn't always monitored. But then, they don't yet know how to clear their browser history. As for when they do, I have root and they don't. Also, our Kyocera router which gives them wireless access keeps logs.
If, some day, they start rebooting the machine to try to mod it, then I'll mod the child to the point that they understand that hacking machines at home (in the 'break in' sense) is not done.
::scrolls up and re-reads earlier comments::
Um, where did anyone say she didn't have a right to do so? Telling her there's not really any effective way to do so does not equal telling her she can't.
Honestly, what it is really going to come down to is trust. She can't police her kids internet usage 100% of the time. And the only way to lock down a computer to keep her kids "safe" 100% of the time is to simply disconnect it from the internet. But, as others have already said, they can just go over to a friends house and gain access that way. Lets face it, we are ALL curious at a young age. Obviously you don't want a 9 yr old viewing explicit material, but around puberty, kids are curious about themselves and others. I wouldn't advocate making material readily available, but a certain amount of "peeking" is healthy. When I was a kid, it was my friend and I finding some of his older brothers "hidden stash" of magazines. Am I worse off for finding it? I highly doubt it. In fact, I dare say I had less questions after being exposed to it than before finding it. In my opinion, she's going to have to just accept the fact that her kids are going to be exposed to naughty words, pictures, stories, jokes, etc. It is part of growing up. She should probably just talk to, and teach her kids a little bit first and then trust that they can satisfy their curiosities without it ever becoming a "problem".
Seriously though if shes worried about it, she may have deeper trust issue with her child. Technology won't make your child more trustworthy, it will just make the child not trust you. Sounds like they need to talk more.
Lock the case via the standard security slots (all Macs have one). If the kid can pick a $25 lock from the hardware store, she has more to worry about than his choice of online reading material. Install EFI firmware config software made by the guy who makes NetRestore. Install Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) when it comes out next month. Use the built in Parental Controls system preferences.
Alternatively, sit down with your child and explain why the content you do not want them to see is objectionable.
If the threat is primarily visual, then change out the monitor to a nice ol' amber monochrome display. He'll pretty much be left with trying to satiate his urges with ASCII art.
Granted, this solution might be rather crippling on permissible usage of the computer as well.
Install PacketProtector directly on your wifi router. It contains Dan's Guardian, which is fairly easy to lock down. Get a USB WiFi adapter for the home computer, configure the router to only accept connections from its MAC address. When it's bedtime, pull the WiFi adapter out of the computer and lock it up in your room.
It's not perfect, but should keep an honest kid honest.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
How about something like OpenDNS?
I can't say I've used it for this purpose, but it does seem to support the notion of adult site blocking, and is pretty trivial to configure, even for a non-geek.
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
Explain the household "acceptable use policy"
Then have the household computer located in a public space in the house, not in an out of the way corner.
No one will have porn up on the monitor if it's likely that your mom (or little sister/brother/snitch) is guaranteed to walk by on a regular basis in the course of going about their normal life.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
get the teen a pc and put it behind a firewall and log all websites accessed. When asswatcher.com or onionbooty.com show up in the logs, bring it to his/her attention and tell them it's not permitted. if they go back to the site, go back to them with a belt in hand and wear their ass out for being disobedient.
corporal punishment kept kids in line for thousands of years, no sense in trying something else.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I monitor every move my kids make online using squid and log analyzers for various things. I also deny connections to everything but SPECIFIC websites that must have my OK before added to the list. Granted it can be a giant pain in the butt to add in subdomains to sites if needed, but this is far preferable to my 8 year old stumbling across anything she shouldn't. I also think putting the system in a place easily viewable is a help, but even for my teenage daughters, synergy is great for viewing their desktops at any time. Which I frequently do while I'm working, I'll have their desktops on a separate display and they know it.
But nothing overcomes good parenting. Sadly, the good parents (and I like to think I am one) have kids well behaved enough to know not to go looking for it, but they are usually the ones who put those controls in place. It's the crappy, loser parents who don't and then bitch and moan about all the stuff on the web, or that their kid gets snatched by some predator on MySpace. With well raised kids, the THREAT of being monitored is just about enough. But even I'm not stupid enough to think my kids are perfect. I make sure they know the risks and the threats out there, I cant shield them completely, that's insane, they have to know the whole story, not just hover over them at all times thinking that if I hide them from it, it will never happen to them.
So, I have to be a Nazi about what they see. Just in case.
Pax Vobiscum
Locking down user accounts will just brake most games that he likely plays on the system and maybe buying more games may keep him off of the porn.
Also spybot's immunize will block some of the real bad ones that try to mess up the system.
Clone the desktop to the tv in the living room. There's plenty holes in that strategy I know, but maybe access can be physically disabled when he's alone at home? Like take the modem to work or something.
Anyway a friend did this with his daughter, drove her crazy cause she could only use the internet when he was able to flip the remote to video and see what she was looking at whenever he wanted. Once in a while he would get a black screen (screen saver) and he'd be straight to the stairs to see why.
She did once change clone to second desktop, that fooled him for about a week, but then she got grounded.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
OpenDNS? I use OpenDNS and it has adult site blocking capabilities. I have not personally tested them. But it's a start.
This may not be what she wants to hear, but the solution that has worked for us has been a slow process of education, not technical restrictions. Different kids have different issues that need to be addressed. Our son (now on his own at college) mainly had issues with too much non-productive web surfing and to some degree, too much gaming, but not porn. Basically, he wasn't getting his homework done. I could have blocked internet access to his machine, but we decided not to do that. Over time, with constant support from us, he began to realize that doing his homework and getting good grades in school was his ticket to bigger and better things. He eventually learned to balance his time better and had no problem getting into UC Berkeley.
Our daughter (in 8'th grade) is similar but different. Her issue is also spending too much time surfing sites like myspace and deviantart, and IM'ing with friends. Educating her has been a little harder, but instead of blocking her machine, we moved it out of her room where it is easier for us to keep an eye on how she's spending her time. Since doing that, she is gradually learning to balance her time better.
Ultimately, your kids are going to be out on there own, and it is better if they can learn to balance their time (with your help) before they're gone than just block everything and have them leave with no time management skills.
Useless..
I used to have friends that were still in high school and unable to access MySpace (God forbid). Pretty simple to make blah.mydomain.com -> , and they were able to resume rotting their brains in no time.
Although, not everyone has their own domains and hosting server, but it's still pretty trivial with stuff like dyndns.com.
You were right to tell the kid's mother that there is no technological solution to this problem. She needs has issues around whatever she considers 'inappropriate content,' and a mental health professional could help her with those.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
And since there's only like half a dozen or so domain names that serve porn and no new ones ever show up, this is quick and easy.
You, Fine Sir, must be unfamiliar with the wild world of braille porn. It's especially nice if you learn how to read it with the correct digit.
Simple methods can work for simple minds, but as the subject of control is now a teenager, more sophisticated methods will be required. My suggestion is self-control based upon the strength of the relationship, which means explaining beliefs (why), expectations (acceptable behavior), and consequences (the stick).
Really now, there are no magic pills, and no magic software, that could possibly replace a human parent raising a human child. Or you could just say Fuck-it and let him be raised by daycare, then the public school system, and then finally the state correctional system.
So after you lock the box down so tight it can't be used for anything practical, for less than the cost of a pair of jeans junior can buy a used laptop that is more than capable of showing jpegs and playing RealMedia, plug it straight into the cable modem bypassing both your domain controller and your spiffy locked-down machine, and do whatever he wants. Oh, you use a filtering ISP? Do all of your neighbors have their wireless routers secured too?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I see two big problems in this solution. First, you have to find the name of EVERY pr0n site that you don't want the child accessing. Second, after this is done, the kid has a comprehensive list of EXACTLY what you don't want then to see. This will quickly be at a friend's house.
squid is only part of a solution. The real solution is sending your child to a psychologist to understand what motivates a teenage boy to want to look at naked women in the first place! If porn is wrong, then most of us, including you closeted christian freaks, are wrong.
I can't fathom not allowing my teenage son to view porn. It's the one great teenage pursuit. It's more productive than knocking up some 16 year old girl. That would be great parenting!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I know that some of the older versions of the Linksys WRT54GS have true hardware filtering, that should make it impossible to beat for the average kid (unless he knows how to set up a proxy, you could block the instructions on how), and it works with anything that can connect to it via WiFi. The only issue is that it has a tendency to crash the router every once in a while.
the suggestions to filter sites or even monitor the sites is not
really feasible. For instance, sites such as google images can
deliver a lot of caches images that may be objectionable,
but that would pass unseen through monitoring. Social network
sites are the same way - many sites are explicit in nature.
So put the computer in a non-private place and make it known
that it is not to be used for that purpose or else there
will be consequences.
Technologically speaking, of course. It's no substitute for actually parenting, but a user account on a linux box with a fixed IP connected to a properly secured Cisco router with a white list ACL would do it. Pretty labour intensive though... might as well just spend the time parenting.
It's clearly impossible to make a 100% effective block against "bad stuff" on the internet. But as a parent and an engineer, that's OK. It's enough to put up a road block that prevents casual or accidental "crossing the line". If the kid is determined enough to do real work to get to online porn, then at least hopefully he learned something about computers.
And for people that think that it's wrong for a parent to try to control what their kids see/do online, well, I can sympathize, but what you see and do online affects you, and there are some things that it's not a good idea to put into a teenager's head. I'm certainly no prude, but if my kids were looking around the internet for snuff films, I certainly wouldn't want it to be EASY.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
and a stupidly long password or a usb dongle to decrypt. on the other hand in that case i'd just boot knoppix... there really is no way to prevent that...
Midgets with Horses?!?! Dud, I SO need that url!
Being 15, I'm going to add my own viewpoint.
1) People want what they can't have. If you restrict or block something, people want to get around it, even if its only to prove their point.
2) Trust and respect your kids. Its a two way thing. Trust and Respect them and they will trust and respect you.
3) Make you values clear, but don't ram it down their throats. Young teenagers are starting to form their own opinions on things. They can think for themselves and if you've brought them up right then they will make the right choice.
As other people have stated, you can't moniter them 24/7. They have a small measure of independance, let them learn to use it.
I wonder if people once had the same discussion about chastity belts.....
She may say she wants her boy to not look at porn, but that's probably not the root issue; perhaps she should contact this company, which has a solution to the real problem.
http://www.infernosoft.com/investments/viriguard/faq.html (many NSFW pages on links, but page itself mostly text)
I shudder at the lack of trust between this young man and his mother though. If it is justified, he will probably end up in jail once he turns 18 and can no longer be legally restrained.
So, let me get this straight: almost every young male who disobeys his mother's command not to look at dirty web sites, will "end up in jail once he turns 18"?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
http://www.spectorsoft.com/
It's not open source, it's not free, it's not even exactly what I'd call cheap. But, it does seem to do a bang up job and it's harder to defeat than the average programs that do the same thing. Not only can it block URLs, chats etc, but it can monitor anything that's done on the PC (including webmail), email screen shots of activity, analyze what's happening on the PC in real time and if it's severe enough, notify you immediately. There's a ton of features in it. Also, though not impossible, it was not as trivial to detect and defeat as most. Heck, it's probably some form of rootkit in its own right.
Maybe goes too far for some, but it is decent software for what it does. If I remember right, licensing was kinda limiting and I didn't like the activation features, but I'd still call it best of breed. There is also several different versions with different capabilities.
Just a disclaimer... I don't work for them, am not affiliated with them and have never purchased their product, but I have worked for and with people whom have purchased. I helped them decide on a solution and we tried many such programs. This was hands down the best. It's also been a few years since then though, but I imagine it has only gotten better.
I am Homer of Borg. Resistance is Fut.. Mmmmmmmm, Donuts!
Monitored net connection + 2 second's though => encrypted tunnel.
Which are widely available. And dead simple with a basic level of technical understanding.
Let's see....
Encrypting solutions:
TOR... because that's exactly what it was made to defeat
HTTPS proxy web sites... check
ssh tunnel... to a friend's house, to a free/low cost public host, to a school/university account, to your ISP/webhost...
openvpn... to the same
stunnel... to the same
etc...
Bypassing the network entirely:
illicit wifi card with high gain antenna pointed out window
POTS modem
RFC 1149
cinemax
or how about just an email from some friend containing "awesome pix!!!"
The point is that while monitoring the upstream connection may be the best technical solution, there's no way it will achieve the objective "deny kids porn." If you trust them so little, sit with them when they use the computer. That won't work either, of course; it will just shift the "activity" to another location or another format. They still sell magazines, you know. I suppose you could be a dick and flag anything the you don't recognize, but come on, you don't have that much time and the kids don't need to be yelled at for connecting to an SSL protected jabber server. All you've really achieved is to create a system horribly invasive of the privacy of *everyone* in the house.
At its core monitoring like this is only trains your kids to act as though they'll always have a Big Brother watching everything they do. I personally find that repugnant and hope you stop and let them know that privacy violations from people "in authority" shouldn't be accepted as normal. Finally, do you let your spouse/S.O. peruse the family http logs as well? Would you let everyone in the house read your email to make sure it's clean?
I hope not, and I hope you don't continue doing it to your kids. Please don't train them to be government stooges ready to trample my privacy when they grow up because they were raised in a homegrown surveillance state.
P.S. One gold star for having the most effective and achievable pr0n countermeasure proposed. That's why China uses it too.
It will actually use a category filter.
:-)
Obviously, there is no "absolute" solution, but for a mother's worry, this should do the trick.
It will at least require her son (who may not know how to even install an app - we don't know how technical he is) to go to a lot more work for his pr0n.
But according to Fox news, it's "floating in midair" all the time
www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155161
While I don't have a specific product in mind, avoid anything that attempts to filter out the bad stuff. It will never stop it all. Instead, use a product that allows for whitelisting. Deny everything by default, and then allow access to sites one at a time. This is great for young children -- disney.com, nick.com, etc make a nice, short, finite, manageable list. Teens may be a bit tougher, but minimally the kid has to come ask for a specific site to be whitelisted.
And, if proxy-style whitelisting is not an option, maybe a DNS server that defaults all resolution to 127.0.0.1, and allows overrides.
Use something at your router, if possible. Either an embedded DNS server (2Wire, I think, has one), or something like OpenWRT on a WRT54G, with either configurable DNS or a proxy. Then block all outbound DNS, to make sure that the PC is not simply configured to use external DNS. Possibly, default block IPs, and only allow IPs corresponding to names you've whitelisted.
Of course, how insane do you really want to get, when, as you point out, the kid can simply go to a friends house? How about implanted RFID?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Sometimes even the wisest wise-guy can be un-awares of a planted keylogger. Once in a while check the logger, if the kid has been surfin porn, slap him upside the heads and take away computer privileges.
We are talking about a child right? Porn is a perfectly healthy outlet for a raging hormonal teenage boy. Unless you are one of those people that believe tuggin-it to pr0n is an offense to *diety*?
Use ipcop as your home router (http://www.ipcop.org). Transparently proxy all website, block content (be sure to install advanced proxy). You can install it on a headless machine with no CDROM or other externally accessable boot devices. Superglue can keep most things closed, and going to a friends will be MUCH easier than breaking into a case that you've given some thought to.
Full proof- no such thing, doesn't exit. Some thought and careful application of the firewall rules and transparent proxying will put a big enough stone in the path to at least let teenage son or daughter know that your serious. For this Mom? Probably not, but for 98.7366345% of the slashdot readers it's a find if they didn't know about the project already.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
... for giving teenagers access to 'inappropriate' content. It is not a technical problem, but a pedagogical one. NO COMPUTERS ARE NEEDED to access porn, neo-nazi propaganda, bomb-making manuals, holy books of the "wrong" religion or whatever it is that the parent deems inappropriate.
Point is, what this mother wants is nothing more but flat-out censorship. How did mother-dear deal with the issue when she was a kid? I see two possibilities- Either the pot is calling the kettle black, or she has double standards. Either way, if she doesn't trust her kids, she did a lousy job raising them.
It still is a lot better to allow the kids all that content, openly discuss the subjects and -heaven forbid- guide the kids to deal with it wisely, than to forbid them the same content and have them access it behind your back and beyond your control (at a friends house whose parents are out, for instance).
Also, whatever kids can not access in writing, they'll probably learn from experience. Hmmm... interesting.
So your boss doesn't like the answer "Give up now"? Pity for her. It's the only realistic answer to trying to solve a non-technical problem in a technical manner. Tell her again.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
>
>It's not exactly true. You can very well do so. To expect a determinable result is to court dissapointment, however.
Or as Scott Adams put it (01/23/1996):
(Dilbert is working on a "new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the Internet")
Dogbert:"So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?"
Dilbert: "What is your point?"
Dogbert: "Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"
Just put the computer in an open place, like the living room. Check on it once and a while. Getting caught watching porn (and presumably masturbating) is on of the most embarrassing experiences a young man can encounter.
Personally, I'm pretty shocked that you would suggest that the average teenager is going to take a screwdriver to their computer to get past a bios password. If you are motivated enough, you can get past anything, but it seems pretty unlikely that the average teenager will be motivated enough to even get past the generic filter. More likely, if he must have porn and it's blocked at home, he'll get it somewhere else and put it on a CD or whatever's available.
Easy solution.
1. Explain to child that their actions have consequences.
2. Ask them is they will agree to not use the computer for those purposes.
3. Install pinhole camera beside computer with clear view of the user's chair.
4. after a few weeks inform the child you will be gone for several hours.
5. If the camera picked up anything unwholesome then you child lied and didn't listen.
6. Show child a stack of burned CDs and the pinhole camera.
7. Explain that the consequences are that these CDs will be scattered on their school lawn.
Note: this completely fails if you explain that the CDs are blank.
"Do not fight her battles."
Hmmm. I'll keep that in mind next time someone on slashdot goes on an on about the "coming revolution" and why I should suffer and die so they can benefit.
Any bright kid can find a way around the automatic nanny systems. There is only one solution that works. Here's what I did. Move the computer to the Family Room, with the screen facing the door. Our family room has one wall open to the Kitchen (the most used room in the house.) Now, when either his Mother or I were there, we could see what was on the screen.
I also took to checking the computer for where he had been. I only had to point out 2 times that his attempts to delete all traces of his 2AM trips to the porn sites had missed a few traces (deleted photos. Windows never really erases a deleted file.) He stopped using the family computer for that kind of thing completely. Of course, I still checked from time to time, till he moved out on his own.
A history list that is blank is the first warning sign. A simple search for temp HTML or JPEG's will often turn up the evidence. An undelete utility is handy too. A tool that reports locations where files have been zero'd will let you know quickly if there has been an effort to tamper. It's not too hard to keep a step ahead.
For those times when one of the children try to cover up the screen, I just killed the power to the machine. Worst case, I might have to re-install the software. Lots better than losing a kid to some online pedophile.I had to let the children know that there is no privacy when safety is involved. after a couple of kills, they stopped trying to keep us out.
Watch out for Myspace (and its clones) with young girls, they trust everybody and question nothing (except the parents). The boys are marginally better. Especially after 16 or 17. My favorite news story of the last year was where the 35 year old pedophile masquerading as a 15 year old boy onnline went to the mall to pick up the 13 year old girl he had arranged a 'date' with and found out that she was really a 45 year old cop who was working with the guys probation officer.
Sometimes there is justice.
You see, there is no substitute for parental presence. There never will be. If your boss wants to really protect her children, she needs to be there with them. Not out bossing you. Sorry, that is just reality. She can't have it both ways. None of us can. She will have to pick the one that is important, and let the other one go.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Gunrunner from office.
Getting around stuff is easy, so don't make that the challenge. Monitor all activity. If and when the kid goes to a site mommy dearest finds inappropriate, have her actually talk to them. Explain why it is bad.
And when the kid ignores adult advise, just let them know that they are always watched. Fear of discovery, and consequences, should be far more effective than locking down access.
That way they'll only view porn on other people's computers and mommy can sleep at night.
In your internet router, force the dns to use the opendns information...
Works, somewhat well. Doesn't stop you from using google images, though.
Assuming her son is a bright, all a concerned parent should do is install an invisible logger that logs everything being said.
This way at the end of the day, the parent can review the logs, and then decide accordingly based on inappropriate content.
Now the only problem is if the logger is on the PC the child is using, it can give itself away if it crashes, or if the child is paranoid enough to look for such things.
Anyhow good parenting is all about talking to your children and helping them make good choices, after all no one can fix the bad friends loophole...
The only hard part is wiring the speakers so that at the lowest setting they can still be heard throughout the house.
On a related note, if you want to protect your child so that they will never go anywhere dangerous in the real world, all you need to do is to move to Alaska and rent some infrared satelite time to make sure that if your kid does leave home, your infrared satellite can track him down before he gets anywhere dangerous.
In both the real world and the internet, you need to be able to trust that your kid will not do stupid things.
In both cases, a simple, fair rules, with some checking should be enough to solve your real problems.
For the internet, restrict their access while alone, but I suggest you offer to take them to ANY website they want to go, as long as you can be there with them. Prove it by taking them to some innapropriate sites (let them pick which ones, don't show them your favorites...) Then comment on the nude pictures/lies/bullcrap/etc. If you can't do this with them, then chances are they won't learn your values.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is perhaps going to be an unpopular stance, but my view is that it is really misguided to prevent your teenage child from surfing the net freely and privately. I understand the parental desire to "protect," but I personally believe that teenagers also have a right to freedom and privacy.
I understand that for young children, supervision may be required. But if you can't trust your teenager to surf the net on their own, you have much bigger problems. In such a case, you should also not trust them to use the phone alone, go to a friend's house, go to the mall, or even go to the library unsupervised. There are countless opportunities for "misbehaving." Unless you want to watch their every move (or lock them in a closet), you have to trust them.
Make your kids watch you in a porno. They'll be put off porn for life...
First don't have a computer or laptop with wireless access, otherwise you will be out chasing down all of your neighbors to get them to lock down their wireless networks with WAP keys. Next get a decent firewall with content filtering such as a Sonicwall and lock it and the DSL or Cable modem in a closet and configure the firewall with reasonably strong password. Configure the firewall to what ever degree of filtering you want and you're done. This is about as simple and as much as any decent parent who doesn't want to have to watch their kids every movement should do.
Just point your DNS requests in you router to 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222 (opendns' servers) Then open an account with them. configure your account to block p0rn sites, and Lock you router with an strong password. That will hold it for a wile....(maybe)
Live CD.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Move the computer to a well-used room where people are always around.
I have to say I agree with those posters who suggest *talking* with your kids and keeping an eye on what they're up to. It's called parenting folks - it's not supposed to be easy. In my opinion you need to set expectations and limits until the kiddos demonstrate some maturity. Curiosity is good. Explaining that euro fetish defecation video isn't an accurate depiction of what goes on in a *normal* committed adult relationship might seem redundant to an adult, might not be so apparent to a 12 yo though. So maybe the 12 yo shouldn't be getting their first sex-ed discussion from some xxx.com. Maybe the 12 yo should not be wandering the Interweb recklessly. And certainly your kids should be talking to you and you should be talking to them (whether they hate it or not) about what they see out there. My 2 cents.
Honestly, as others have said if it's really something that the kid wants to bypass, they will. Even if you can reasonably stop the child from accessing websites, that doesn't stop them from getting it from their friends, whether through emails, at their friends house, etc. You can't filter through their entire life, it's just not a reasonable solution.
.22 long rifles. I mean they weren't by any means serious weapons, but it was still a firearm with live rounds being fired. Some parents had the reaction, "I can't let my child use guns!!!", and thus wouldn't let their teens be instructed or use the firearms while at the camp. Others understood that by allowing them to come to the range and having a trained instructor teaching their teens about the safe use of firearms was more valiable than just avoiding the fact that firearms exist. I like to think that by teaching them the proper use, if/when they encounter firearms they'll have at least some knowledge to make better judgements. Same applies here, your boss shouldn't avoid reality -- they should be doing all they can to lead their teen the right way and providing them all they can to make proper judgements.
The real problem that your boss should be addressing is the use of pornography to her child. I mean if the problem was alcohol, you wouldn't try to stop your teenager from drinking by removing all of the alcohol from your household and then just assuming they won't get it elsewhere. Discussion is what matters, and then it's a matter of being open and having trust and honesty there.
Also, as others have mentioned tightening your parental grip just causes your teenagers to fight back against you. Saying "don't look at porn" causes them to try to find ways to do it and make sure you dont know. Discussing pornography openly gives them a means to express things to you. If your child knows you won't get angry or shun them (thats what I thought when I was growing up) because they have a question about their brand new sensations, they're more likely to talk to you about it and you can actually provide positive parental effects for things that will happen whether you like it or not. Pornography, underage sex and the use of condoms, underage drinking, drugs amongst other things all need to be discussed with your teenagers, not avoided. If you don't have these discussions with them, someone else will... and that someone else is most likely going to be one of their friends.
A little anicdote: I used to work at a rifle range at a summer camp, instructing youth (15+) about the safe use of firearms and then monitoring them firing
You obviously lack children :-)
The posed question is wrong. The real issue is not preventing visiting inappropriate sites. It's for the parent to be informed about where their children are visiting. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a parent to want to do. Even if you are the exception to that desire, the fact is that desire is normal and for most parents a good idea.
Now for this task there are two issues to confront
1) gathering the information
2) reducing it to useful things.
The first is probably relatively simple. Just gathering IPs and logging Reboots would contain the info. Namley where they went, and if they are trying to evade the system. (I note that a reboot on a linux or mac is probably a more seldom event than on a Windows, though maybe that's changed with vista).
But that's also too raw an info for the normal parent to parse.
Thus what you need to find is some sort of net nanny like service that will send you log of all the inappropriate sites that were flagged. You don't want to "prevent" them from visiting since that would quickly result in them figuring out which places not to try to visit. And result in them finding sites off the net nanny radar.
add onto that a grep for thing that look like non port 80 traffic and other suspcicious activity.
Ultimately all you need is a good system for detecting WHen you ought to pay more attention.
It's like searching your kids room for drugs. That's not something one should do. It sends a bad message to a good kid. But if your kid is stubling around or you smell weird smells, or a perscription bottle in his pants pocket when you do the wash, then sure go on and search it.
Same principle here. You just need some indicator sites to monitor. If those go off, then you have a talk or move the bedroom computer to the living room.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Being a teenager, I'm telling you that actions like these can be the worst you'll make.
You can spend hours and hours on your system, dedicating your entire resources to try and filter what we see. That's all good and dandy, but you're forgetting something. A teenager, if really determined, will dedicate their entire resources to try and bypass your controls. The relationship between a parent and a teenager is already tough enough. Do you want to create another battle to fight over?
It doesn't matter what you do to try and censor someone, because it's a losing battle either way.
If you do manage to make some kind of panopticon of a system, then you'll lose any trust you had with your son or daughter. If you don't think that would really happen, then know that I'm telling you this from my personal experience, and the experiences from a lot of my friends.
What's worse is that if you make a system to prevent them, and then they break it, not only will you have crushed a lot of their trust that they had with you, but they will also have the ability to go looking for porn, and they will believe that they can outsmart you. (Once again, this is from personal experience.)
So let me ask you this. Are you really willing to take the risk of them having a perfect argument against you the next time you fuck up ("Why didn't you come talk to us about this?" "Because you've shown me that you don't have enough trust to be someone I'd feel safe talking too.")? Are you really willing to take the chance of pushing them away that far because you don't trust them?
Like I said, this is just off my personal experience. If you start censoring someone now in extravagant ways, then you run the risk of killing a lot of trust.
it's called Personal Responsibility(tm). you install it in your child's brain by Talking(tm). You ensure it's working via Trust(tm)
everything else is police state tactics which just teaches your kids that you don't trust them, which is something worse for a child to learn than exactly how many cucumbers amber bubbles can insert in her birth canal
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If there's a reasonable old PC available that can run IP Cop it's fairly easy.
I've done it with my Daughter and IPCop, Clark Connect, Smoothwall.
It takes some maintenance and effort, though. Perhaps it should be a business opportunity for me -- but most folks think the PC software packages like McAfee's Privacy Manager would work. My kid got through that one in 15 minutes when she beat the password manager into submission and got my admin password on it.
The Linux firewall method with content filter works well. Perhaps the commercial ClarkConnect would work since the Point Clark networks folks would support her and you wouldn't have to.
A remarkable new algorithm for raising children! It's open source too -- free as in speech, and free as in sippy-cups of beer.
When I do become a parent (o happy day!) the computer will sit in the living room for many, many years. This is one suggestion in the parenting algorithm.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
Hi,
I am one of the inventors of a new product that does exactly what you are looking for, it is called KidSafe (check out www.thinkgeek.com who sell it online). We use hardware (a secure usb token) like the keys to your car and software to let parents effectively control access to the family pc. Software alone can never provide a flexible or secure enough solution. Kid these days often know more about the computer than their parents and as many families are on the windows platform it can be really difficult to set up user privilleges effectively. Whoever controls the key controls the computer, not a perfect fit for everybody but great when you have a son or daughter who sits playing games or chatting for 14 hours a day.The software has many security features that make it very difficult to bypass or remove from the system. The most important thing we have found to consider when trying to keep kids safe online is that no technology solution alone is as good as parental guidance but a little help can certainly go a long way!
st.john - kidsafe inventor
www.kid-safe.co.uk
This very topic came up on Dan Savage's advice column, "Savage Love" (see the Onion's AV club site for more details). The best suggestion I saw was from a guy who was hiding porn mags under his mattress as a teenager. Mom found out, and simply replaced them with copies of Good Housekeeping. Best non-lecture ever imparted, no?
The same writer extended this approach to Web browsing. Basically, chances are Johnny hasn't been deleting his Web browser's history, so a proactive parent can check it, and then try visiting bogus sites that are similarly spelled. For example, if www.hotbabes.com appears in Johnny's history or cache, you visit www.hotbabe_JohnWeKnowYouAreVisitingThis.com .
The next time Johnny types in the URL with auto-complete turned on, he'll know his folks disapprove, and that his surfing is being monitored.
It would also help if Mom talks with Johnny later, but active parenting techniques are beyond the scope of this post.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
... when I worked for Geek Squad. I'd tell them the best way to stop them from accessing porn is to keep the computer in a common area. Little Billy won't be looking at any dirty pictures if his mom is working in the kitchen right behind him. Aside from that, I told them to talk about computer use the same way they would talk about dating, sex, driving, etc. Let them know clearly what behavior is expected, what the dangers are, and what the consequences will be if they break the rules. You know, parenting.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
We have a teenage daughter...and the Internet is to her what TV was to me. Fortunately, she is young enough that the internet is not also the equivalent of the damp stack of mags that my friends and I kept in the woods...but that's a story for another day.
She loves IM...and MySpace and Facebook. She also loves text messaging...and frankly, it is somewhat scary. Unlike when I grew up, parents are often no longer the gatekeepers for communication. When I was a child, friends had to call my house...and thus, my parents generally knew with whom I was speaking outside of school. All bets are off now with such varied and ubiquitous communication devices at their disposal. That said, we are still parents...and we make them available...so we have responsibilities.
Our strategies:
1) The family computer is kept in a high-traffic public place in the house
2) My office computer is kept locked
3) The internet turns off at 9:00 pm (per the router config)
4) The cell phone is a privilege...that gets pulled when necessary. Ditto the internet.
5) And, without a doubt, the most important strategy - we stay involved. We talk every day...and make an effort to both be parents (not friends), but also people on whom she can rely and trust. I know pretty much all of her friends' names...and what went on each day...and we go to school functions (football games, etc.) to help stay in touch. We also do our best to not be incredibly embarrassing so she does not mind still having us around and involved (don't discount this one). We also try our best to balance her need for privacy with our need to know what's going on to support her best interests. Finally, we talk frequently (in casual conversation) about a wide range of related topics, including the potential dangers of internet access...and posting info that you don't want to come back to bite you...either next week or when she is applying for college or a job.
It's a daily struggle and I don't intend to imply that we think we have everything worked out. We are doing well for now...but like any other plan, it's got to be dynamic. What it cannot be, however, is apathetic. That said, she is maturing a little more each day...and we need to recognize both her increasing need for independence and our continued responsibilities as parents. She won't become a responsible adult on her 18th birthday. In some respects, she is becoming closer to that person each day...and any applied strategy must accommodate that reality...and hormones.
BTW, neighbors with unprotected wireless access points are a pain in the ass to parents.
Some of the Linksys routers support "Linksys parental control" whick allows you to set time limits and levels of access, locked to an account per user which you can tie to the MAC address. You can create custom "allowed lists", and control instant messaging too. They send you logs of every web site your kids look at. It costs about $50 per year. I can highly recommend it, and its a much more robust solution than net nanny software.
Have we tried modifying the kid instead of the computer? The computer's just doing what it was built to do... DAMMIT! The kid's just doing what he was built to do, also. Disconnect a few components and repurpose him as a neutered slave for an Asian emperor. It is the only choice besides blind acceptance.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It's the only real solution.
If you're not always around then you're stuck. Nothing you can do will prevent kid looking at porn (and you shouldn't even be trying, it sends completely the wrong message and probably has the opposite effect to what you want (the whole teen process is about finding the "forbidden fruit" - forbid something and it turns into tasty fruit).
No sig today...
What on earth is the big deal with porn? What exactly are people are afraid will happen if their children are exposed to it? There are much bigger threats in the more innocent seeming areas of the internet like children's chat rooms.
My aunt and uncle were in the sex industry, completely unapologetic about it, were nudists and had porn lying around the house like some people have Vogue, etc. I'm happy to report that my cousin, who was exposed to all this from birth, grew up to be quite a normal middle class woman - happily married, not promiscuous, not perverted, not demented, no weird fetishes, just plain open-minded. Sex is so natural to her as to be a non-issue. I'm happy for her kids too, who are also going to grow up thinking it's perfectly natural.
If this woman's teenage son needs an outlet for his natural inclinations why stop him? Hell, most men his father's age probably had a porno or two under their mattress.
Its not a technical issue at all.
Its about mothers' reactions to male adolescent sexuality which they are seeing in the raw and closeup in their sons, maybe for the first time.
I would explain, if he just is looking for porn, this is, however little you may like it, quite normal and ordinary and all boys do it. Only worry if the porn becomes obsessively s/m or fetishistic. For many women, the raw impersonal lust of adolescent boys is quite worrying - as it would be for us, were we women.
If however he is communicating with other people about it, do worry. This is the danger: communications whose implications he doesn't fully understand, and with people who are not what they seem.
In either case, the only solution is communication with him. There are no technical solutions to this.
But the real question is: what is she worried her son may be doing?
Not feasible for most homeowners, but here's an idea:
Setup a server in a secure room in your house that is always locked, has no windows, etc. Give your child a dummy interface to that server that only allows them to do very very basic things, ie, surf the internet. Limit the sites they can view only to a very small subset of trusted sites, and block everything else.
I'm not sure how i would go about bypassing that configuration.
Put a password on the bios and put a lock on the computer case. Most computer cases I've seen have a place on the back where you can put a padlock.
Of course, then when he is at his friend's house, he'll be looking at internet porn AND websites that show how to pick locks.
Technoli
No, actually it is a very good one and it is what I do at home with my children. All the home computers are in my office, which has French doors with glass window panes, connected to the living room.
:) ). I am wiser for the experience any my kids will have to work harder than I did. But eventually, they will find ways to get around me. Its part of life. You teach them as best you can, you set up a basic perimeter to keep them out of trouble, but eventually they will find it. You only hope that they are big enough to handle what they dig themselves into.
That being said, my parents weren't careful and I did shit they had no clue about (one time they sat me down because they thought I was 'doing things' which they never specified, I showed them my internet history, which was clean... I cover my tracks
You could always use Privoxy. It takes a bit of configuring at first, but if your network is configured properly, it would work well. Here's one way that COULD be bypassed, but I'm too lazy at the moment to think of how.. Set up a parent's PC with Privoxy. Deny all access to the public internet from child's PC. This would force the child's PC to only get internet access if they are using the parent's PC as the proxy. You could always deny only port 80 to the child's PC, but that's only going to stop so much. I'd recommend a minimum of 80 and 443 (https). Good luck!
No it doesn't goddammit who the fuck are you to speak for TOR?!
SSH tunneling...
Use an RDP client...
VPN to internet based host...
Host file hacks...
Proxy viewers like google...
You can't stop a determined person from viewing stuff online. So, change the person, not the technology...
Agreed, that's about the only technical solution that will work. And keep the router under lock and key, because physical access is everything. If it's accessible, it just needs to be swapped out for one without controls. Even then, if a neighbor has an open wireless AP, you're out of luck.
Ditto WRT control of questionable materials. It's not censorship, it's called parenting. But even if some want to call it censorship, so what? As a parent, I have that right. Letting your kids do whatever they want == failure as a parent and the production of monsters.
But about beer, though, at some point in their teens, I'd recommend that people really ought to buy their kids beer and teach them to drink at home. I drank at home under parental supervision as a high school student, and so by the time I turned 21 (and before, because one of my close friends turned 21 a year before me, which basically meant getting beer whenever I wanted it), drinking was not a big deal and I felt no need to go out and get shitfaced beyond belief in order to celebrate my maturity at turning 21. That doesn't mean I never got drunk, but it did mean I only did it in safe environments, and never in a situation when I would have to drive. Most everyone learned to drink at home that way when my parents were teenagers (at least in the Midwest), and it seems a much better/safer/healthier way to me. The way 21 is regarded with near-religious significance here doesn't make sense to me. Some countries make much less of a big deal about alcohol and I think they're better off for it.
1. which is usually trivial to bypass either by disabling it or simply going around it and going to a friend's house.
2. no, it isn't censorship in the typical sense and minors don't necessarily have the right to view what they want, though that doesn't automatically make blocking stuff a good idea, as they WILL get the inane right to view it in a few years anyway. arbitrary rules do not exactly invoke respect of the rules or the rulemaker.
3. no, but not teaching them about things isn't a particularly an awesome idea. teaching them about alcohol and advocating moderation is a better idea than simply leaving them ignorant and being forced to turn them loose as such when they hit 18/19/21.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
1. get's the discussion out in the open about the specifics of a mutual agreement (and related explanation about the basis of the agreement) that both parties consent to 2. if/when they violate the agreement, you confront them with a simpler issue;ie. they broke an agreement which to me seems easier to explain as a bad thing than the more complex discussion of "drugs are bad" (or under drinking, porn, etc)
There a a couple of filter programs that do a good job of limiting content. However, given enough time, anyone can "find" something. Some programs (safeeyes is one of them) that allow you to page, email, or call someone in the accountability if the user get too many denies within a certain period of time. So if little Johnny is fishing for pr0n, it won't take long before someone is notified. 5-10 denies within 12 hours is fine for legitimate surfing. If you are after pr0n, 5-10 denies a minute is more likely.
I worked as a counselor a computer camp the summer after the Columbine shootings. For the first time in the program's history, we had to make each parent sign a waiver stating whether or not their child was allowed to play violent video games during our regular recreational period. I recall one father who brought his young son in, and was about to select the option requiring us to block access to these games. But, at the last minute, he turned to his son and said "You know what you're allowed to play and what you're not, right?" The child agreed and the father signed the waiver allowing full access to any games, violent or not.
I was more than a little surprised by this but when I mentioned it to another counselor, she said it was no big deal, just a simple matter of being able to trust your kid. I'm not a parent and I don't know what you can do to create this level of trust between yourself and your child, but it's great to know that it's possible and that there are families out there that have this. It seems like the popular conservative and liberal beliefs out there are, respectively, that you need to keep total control of your child, or that they'll find a way to get away with it anyway so just be supportive.
So, for someone with one of these attitudes, you should just point out a cheap software solution that is easily defeatable. If the kid cracks it, chances are that the mom won't find out anyway...but this is a good thing. The mom will feel great knowing that she's being a "good parent", especially since the solution has your "professional" endorsement. Plus the kid will feel great because cracking the protection will make him feel like a l33t hax0r. This is the only win-win situation in a case where simple trust is impossible.
Some times making them uncomfortable or even de-mystifying the subject... What am I talking about it's a horny teenage boy and booby pics, give up now.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Only my Linux box in the basement has internet access. It'd dual-NIC'd; one port goes to the DSL box and the other to a switch where all the house computers are connected. The only way they can do websurfing is via the dansguardian filtering proxy on the Linux box. You can tune it to how much or how little you are willing to tolerate. If you set it ridiculously strict, it'll even block all .zip and .rar files "just in case".
But! The best side benefits is the logging. My son does all the hard work of trying to find good porn sites, and then all I have to do is check the log for autoblocked sites to go look at every now and then!
Who needs a porn aggregator site when you have a 15 year old lad hunting them out for you?
Use Scrubit DNS servers.
Put a real Password on your router.
Look at your router logs once in a while to make sure he didn't tamper with it.
Tell yourself you did everything you could when he goes over to his friends house for porn.
http://www.scrubit.com/
It was a few years ago .... I don't remember the exact one but it was hilarouis
Pannel #1 - PHB - we are going to make millions making porn filters
Pannel #3 - DOGBERT -You mean you have the power to control the lust of every determined 14 year old kid in the world? Bha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
Put the PC in the living room, with the screen facing outward. Tell Junior he can't use the PC when she's not home.
If he does, and she finds out, he's grounded.
Other than that, he simply sees what every other teenage boys sneaks a look at...
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
I cannot be sure if this has suggested, but I would search for a stealthy (meaning no icons on desktop, start menu or taskbar) screen capture program and install it at a time when Jr. is away. Maybe have video streamed to storage device that Jr. doesn't have access to (physical or virtual) and pray that he does not notice the extra process in Task Manager. You can't circumvent what you don't know about. Then review at high-speed fast-forward during another relatively private opportunity. This easiest if your kid is uninterested in what you do at the computer. In that situation you might possibly be able to get away with reviewing while kid is physically present if he isn't paying attention.
To start, I agree there are no magic bullets.
1) But nobody seems to have mentioned filtered DSL providers which might be a helpful option. You don't have to secure your PC to get filtered Internet.
I have a friend who gets filtered DSL Internet from a company called Integrity Online and that's worked well for him. There is also a list of other filtered Internet companies at: http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Access_Providers/Filtered/. Basically these are ISPs who manage the proxy filters for you, which is more secure than doing it on your PC. (I dunno what you do if you want Cable or a particular ISP; contact the ISP for info then.)
Still, don't expect anyone's filters to be bullet-proof against a curious teen.
2) For someone going down this route, I would definitely strongly consider monitoring solutions in addition or as an alternative to filtering. Others have mentioned this, but it's worth understanding why monitoring is worth doing.
With filtering solutions, the filter company has to ensure they don't block innocuous content, like a NYTimes story that mentions sex. They have to have a low false-positive rate or they get complaints, extra work and dissatisfied customers. A good filter has to have human-review in the loop to avoid false positives, or automated content checks that are either too-strict or too-loose. And the achilles heel of human review is that it's always out of date.
But a monitoring system can have a much higher false-positive rate than a filter and still be effective. In other words, because monitoring systems don't block access like filters, they can cast a wider net and catch more objectionable material without becoming annoying/unworkable/circumvented-unknowingly. Also, the person being watched has no idea whether they are visiting material defined as objectionable so they tend to self-censor and it's much harder to skirt the boundaries of what gets you busted when you don't know what it is. Filters always leave you with an exact knowledge of "that passed, that failed" the filter.
For example, if the monitor just flags every URL that displays the word "sex" in the HTML (or IM message or filename) for example, for filtering this would be unacceptable when blocking, but with monitoring, you as a parent you can kinda just take a look at the list of flagged URLs and gauge if the URLs look like something you care about. Random news sites with the word... no big deal. Porn sites and experimentation to avoid the filter and/or monitor stand out much more easily though.
There's a free monitoring app you can put on your PC that emails to whoever is specified a 'suspicious visited URLs' list every couple weeks called X3watch. I don't know how how good/weak it is from a security standpoint but it flags way more than filters I've seen.
(Note that monitors don't necessarily catch every kind of traffic, nor do they necessarily tell you who was messing with the PC on a particular time/date.)
3) The kid can of course always visit an unfiltered PC/wifi-cell-phone at a library/school/internet-cafe/friend's house, or get DVDs/CDs/magazines from a friend, etc. At the end of the day the parent has to help them understand why they're choosing to restrict them and help them to make the same choices they are enforcing/recommending.
--LP
There are two issues here: CAN she do it, and SHOULD she do it. The answer is most likely "no" to both questions.
Ask her this:
"Is your teenage son generally more computer literate than you are?"
If the answer to this is "yes", she has absolutely no chance whatsoever of filtering him whatsoever.
Then ask her:
"What are you afraid of your teenage son seeing on the internet that you think he hasn't already seen?"
This question should make her think a little. The year is 2007 and we're dealing with an American teenage boy that has access to the internet. He's almost certainly already seen hard-core porn. He probably already has a collection. The important part is that she understands this is normal and appropriate.
This is fundamentally about her, not about her son. She has sexual hangups and doesn't personally care for porn so she's projecting this on her son. She also doesn't understand that teenagers a sexual beings and will be strongly interested in sex, especially girls. Parents need to get used to the idea of their kids having sex, not at some distant date in the future but RIGHT NOW. Yeah, ALL kids. You should be teaching your 5-year-olds about sex because some of them ARE having it. Stop being so squeamish.
First rule of kids, computers and the net is don't let them have a computer in their bedroom. There's more than just pron to get them in trouble.
.gif pron (256 colors!) and buying old issues of Playboy and Swank from my friend's older brother. By the time I was 15, I was able to walk into the bookstore and buy them myself with just a few days growth of facial hair.
If he's clever and determined enough to bypass a siteblocker, keylogger or other monitoring software, then give up. Twenty -ish years ago, I was an thirteen. I was trading floppies of
Got any Victoria's Secret catalogs arriving in the mail? Do you get the Sunday paper with the lingerie ads? Does his school newspaper/yearbook have pics of underage cheerleaders in their short skirts? Your kid will find something to spank it to. Try to focus more on him getting good grades and not turning you into a grandma.
I read a suggestion on here a couple of years ago that struck me as sensible at the time; post the web-browsing logs for the whole family, color-coded by member, on the fridge at regular intervals. It's a social solution rather than a technical one, so it might even work.
--saint
We had a problem like this at my little church. I set up an account with OpenDNS and set the DNS to point there. So far, it has worked.
My dad told me over the phone (While my parents were on holiday for the week) to use a condom. No problem, I thought. My girlfriend picked some up the other day. However, when talking to my mother, she told me I'm too young to be having sex. Ergh.
Heck, maybe if you give your kids some good porn sites to check out, they won't keep looking further and end up on 4chan.
SQL programmer goes to a bar. Walks up to two tables and says 'Excuse me, may I join you?'.
It's called "Suck it up, Mary, and actually sit down with your kid and have a chat with him about something that makes you uncomfortable. Parenting is uncomfortable sometimes. Fucking deal with it."
God, I hate people with avoidance issues. Especially when they're raising children.
+++ATH0
While I agree that putting the computer in a public place will work wonders fighting teenagers from going to adult sites, this may not always work with the latch-key kids who may have a hour before the folks get home.
I bought a Linksys WRT54GS router a while ago (rev 1.1, I think) that talks to the Linksys Parental Control server for site access. My kids have to log in and get access by age group (my 15 year old has access to more places than my 8 year old). Kind of a corporate filter for the home. The setup site is pretty configurable (although is not too intuative), but it works very well for me.
Couple things that could be done to bypass:
1) Change the MAC address on the PC to the MAC address on our Wii (which is setup as a passthrough device, not requiring login)
2) Unplug the cable modem from the router and plug directly into the PC. I have other things running, though, that would notice if they didn't have an Internet connection, though)
All in all, though, it's a slick solution that doesn't require anything to be installed on the PC that the kid can disable in a second or two.
did you ever find that gerbil back ?
I currently use a whitelist to make sure my 6yr old stays off the "bad sites" but that's because shes six and could accidentally stumble onto something she's not ready to see. So i'm not worried about my children. However, I do a lot of repair work for friends and family. And recently have been given a laptop to work on that is so full of spyware and malware that I'm going to have to reinstall. But while trying to get it cleaned up, I've found quite a bit of porn, and i know it was the son that got it (and filled the laptop up with malware) How much do i reveal to the parents. Generally, I ignore anything i find on someone else's computer (unless it's really good, then i keep it for myself.) But this kid is 14 or 15, should I tell his parents or just let it slide? I've been leaning towards letting it slide, since it was just plain old porn. What does /. think?
I set this up for my sister.
Point the computers DNS to OpenDNS and setup an account there. Block the porn with that. Don't give the user admin access so they can't change the nameservers.
Works like a charm. My sisters 16 yr old son no longer gets porn... at home.
http://opendns.org/
I work for a company that does web filtering for small businesses, and we may be able to help, even if it's a home environment. If you're interested, please contact me at smbsec!gmail.com (please replace ! with @).
I use active parenting (regular conversation) and passive monitoring (snort). Works great. I have not disclosed to the kids that home usage is monitored, but the timing and content of certain innocent conversations about the Internet has been influenced by what I've seen there. We all know that they can circumvent it but I try to passively encourage home Internet use as opposed to use outside the home, and don't make an issue of small things.
I actually care a great deal more about chat rooms than porn, and about the physical location of the kids as opposed to the logical location. Full disclosure of one's location and companions at all times, and the carrying of a charged mobile phone, is an ironclad household rule, and we make an effort to know their friends.
#!
Solution:
Decide/accept that your teenage son is mature enough to handle the concept of human sexuality, and understand that exploration is a part of growing up (might be a good time to have a talk); or that he won't access inappropriate sites anyway due to good parenting and respect for limits;
-OR-
Decide that you can't trust your child online, so you put the computer in a high-trafficked area in the house and only turn it on while you can monitor what little Johnny is doing. Violating house rules is a punishable offense in my household. Make it one in yours.
Basically, and I know it's out there but bear with me, I'm suggesting PARENTING YOUR KIDS.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Install something like pcanywhere or radmin that allows you to take over the desktop remotely, wiggle the mouse, etc, then let the kid know that you can do anything you want. Maybe even show then that you can get screen captures while you're away, etc. Then simply say "I don't want to spy on you, but if you make me suspicious, I can and will bust you".. Raising a well adjusted kid helps too.
I think this issue is going to come up more and more as time goes on, though. I had an idea for a system of having approved web sites run their web servers on port 80 plus a newly designated "clean" port, and then parents can block port 80. It would effectively be a white list. There wouldn't be much, if any motivation to publish porn onto the clean port since it would be predominantly brokeass kids using it. Also since it is a newly designated port, the US could require international WAN link operators to restrict traffic such that servers must be inside the US, which would have the effect of establishing an actual enforcible jurisdiction. And of course it is a trivial matter to have most web servers respond to two ports. So the strengths would be ease of implementation, white list certainty, no international loophole, lack of motivation to thwart the system.
And then when the lady from the OP asks, just tell her to lock down port 80 and use the alternate port with all the white list material. If properly marketted, the white list network would contain a vast majority of the non-porn internet.
I use driftnet http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/ running on a computer attached to an Ethernet hub (not switch) between my ISP port and the public side of my home firewall/router/switch. Driftnet displays all GIF and JPEG images going by on the wire. Whenever my kids come into my office to talk with me, they see the monitor sitting there splashing whatever is going by on the network for all to see. Another window is often open displaying any IM on the wire. When they ask why I monitor, I explain that I am probably not the only one monitoring, and that they need to be very careful about any expectation of privacy they may think they can have on the net. I also explain that I care about them and what they do on the net, and that I watch them playing at a park, why would I not watch them playing on the Internet.
Zoot
enough is too much
gov't != parents
I see lots of blabering about where to locate the PC, but does anyone have a technical solution? I have a router with OpenWRT. I'd be willing to put a PC with two network cards between my network and the internet. But I don't know where to go from there. My employer can block me. How can I block my children. (Our Desktop PCs run, Debian Linux & Windows 98, but I'd only accept an upstream solution that can't be bypassed by booting from a Live CD). Cable modem & router are secured in a server closet, so I'm not much afraid of a hardware bypass.
Children are 1 & 2 yrs so I have some time, but I'd like to start planning now.
Off topic: Our county is going with free county wide WiFi. How do you bypass that? And why are my tax dollars paying to bypass my control of the household internet. All the kid needs is a laptop or handlet. But I've heard of paint you can buy that blocks WiFi for their rooms. I don't care about them ever being able to use WiFi in their rooms for legitimate purposes, as I'm a Cat5E wiring freak. I though there was a solution for glass too but I might be mistaken.
You said 'cum'.
"have you ever considered simply shutting off the computer, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
is education. I mean,e ducate the mother. clearly she's a little bit out of date.
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
Seriously... Kids at that age love those games. World of Warcrack is a perfect example.
All the worlds a stage, and I'm the guy running the lights...
It's not perfect, but it's something.
Run a transparent proxy. Lock down the network so that no one can access the internet except through the proxy. You can then add your mostly useless parental controls (e.g. SquidGuard). The only feature that is truly useful is a timer to turn of internet access late at night (and possibly during school hours). Hell, I probably should have used that on myself.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Easy. Install Astaro (free) on a beige box. Turn on the transparent proxy. Select the porn filtering category. Throw out your old router. Don't tell him the password. Done.
Disconnect all connectors inside the case. fill case with cement. Let him have at it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
"until some moron either drops it while walking down the hallway in front of a teacher"
dude, for the millionth time, i'm sorry! fer cryin' out loud that was 1983, LET IT GO!
+1 fashionably cynical
Boy did you miss the point... Are you a parent? The original poster did an excellent job differentiating between sheltering and protecting. If he sees healthy curiosity in his monitorng activities, it looks like he plans to ignore it, but file that knowledge away and keep an eye out for additional actions that might stray further. This is about the best tack you can take. When I was a teen, you would be happy if you found a playboy or more graphic mag in the woods by where the older kids drank, but it didn't have pop-ups leading to ever more graphic and just plain disturbing stuff. A kid could get from googling for Vanessa Hudgens tits to some hardcore beastiality in about 3 clicks on today's Internet. Kids have to grow up too fast Today anyway... Why speed it up by ignoring the possiblity of filtering some stuff out based on your own tolerances.
Keep passing the open windows...
He's a teenage boy. He's a pervert. Nothing she does will change this. If he is a resourceful or computer-savvy young man, he will be able to break whatever anti-porn system someone puts in place. If he is more average, he might be thwarted. In any which way, it is a futile effort and a poor substitute for parenting.
If a parent has values regarding pornography she wishes to instill in her son, she should probably talk to him. Tell him the evils of pornography, whatever the parent sees them as being: Tell him it is disrespectful to the people in the porn. Tell him God does not approve. Tell him it causes people to have unrealistic and debased views about sex and relationships. The parent should explain what is bad about pornography and tell the child that viewing it is unacceptable behavior.
Will that work? Maybe. If not, well, the parent's still done him better than if she had merely tried to thwart his efforts at obtaining pornography. If he does go ahead and not respect the parent's prohibition, it's not the end of the world. Viewing some porn isn't going to ruin your boss's son forever. His dad viewed porn when he was younger and he turned out fine. You too, right?
It's really not a big deal. It's not going to be what kills her little boy. The benefits of trying to teach rather than herd are much more beneficial. (I might add that it's not that I'm a huge porn advocate. For personal reasons, I don't have a byte of it on my computer or otherwise have it around, not counting textual erotic fiction.)
Netnanny, logging firewalls and proxy servers, only supervised usage of the computer, IM logging keystroke loggers, etc. Does no-one realize these are actually worse than doing nothing ?
Think of the message you are sending your adolescent kid. "you can't be trusted", "your an idiot", "your abnormal", "your a perv". Even if you explain it is for his/her own protection the message that they will receive is "you can not take care of yourself", "your a gullible fool who needs protection from internet pervs".
Chances are that their own opinion about themself is somewhat different. The consequence is that they will consider it to be belittling and propably an invasion of their privacy.
It is just as with everything else about parenting kids. Educate them, put some trust in them and make sure they notice that you do, while at the same time ignore the occasional minor transgressions. It is essential for growing up into a repsonsible adult.
Lynx
It's sometimes the case that a lock is only good to keep honest people honest, it your child is basically good and wants your approval, and appreciates you are trying to keep them safe then.
1) Explain to them that online porn is responsible for 90% of compromised windows machines, and this is why you won't allow it, not because you think their natural curiosity is bad. Purchase some National Geographic or other magazines you would be comfortable having in your home if you don't already have some.
2) Put a password on your user account. (yes I know that with XP home it's especially useless, but it is a sign of your authority and a mild obstacle, also if it is changed, you will know it.)
3) Restrict their user account so they can't accidentally allow something to be installed (or uninstall the BeSafe application).
4) Install BeSafe, it's not perfect but it's the best windows approach I've found to suggest.
http://www.bsafehome.com/
5) Set the boot device priority to Hard Drive only, if you can't do this, get a technically minded friend to do it for you.
6) Set a BIOS password, periodically check that it is still active.
7) I really love the suggestion to put the PC in an open family area, I know this doesn't always help especially if the kids have much time alone but I've seen in practice that in homes where the parent's are there, it helps. It doesn't have to be in the living room, a den off to the side with open doors works well and allows for game playing.
Nothing will stop anyone from viewing online porn if they are so inclined a visit to a friends, the library, or coffee shop is all it takes.
This will however present a respectable obstacle from the windows boot perspective and possibly keep your home machine safer.
As everyone has pointed out, there is nothing you can do on a machine which the child has physical access to to do what is requested.
But a separate firewall and proxy that can be locked away can do the job. If the DSL modem (or whatever) and a firewall and proxy server (say smoothwall running on old hardware) are in a room that can be locked then you can force all port 80 traffic to go through a proxy that uses something like SquidGuard). You can also have a default deny policy for outbound traffic so that you select what sorts of services are available.
Of course a determined teenager will learn about third party proxies (the same kinds of things people set up to assist those getting around the Great Firewall of China). But, of course, one can log the web traffic to try to detect these and end up playing whack-a-mole.
As for the rightness of doing this sort of thing, I don't find it so clear cut. My daughter is turning nine tomorrow. We've already told her more than she really wanted to know about how babies are made (she did ask). And she knows in principle about contraceptives (she asked about a particular scene in Grease), but we've got a few years before she'll need practical instructions. She is still in the "yuck" phase, but things will change.
I'm not really concerned about anything she might see or read out there now or later. But my concern is about who she interacts with. On the Internet nobody knows your a dog, and so really what I'm concerned about is getting her to follow a "don't meet or give too much information to someone without me or my wife checking it out first" rule. I think that that is a kind of rule that is easily to break once you no longer think of some on-line persona as a friend. Does this mean that I'll be snooping in on her chats and email? I hate the idea of doing that, but I'm not ruling it out either.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
A PS/2 hardware keylogger only needs to be placed at the end of the device. You needn't even touch the keyboard to install it, let alone unscrew anything.
P.S. Oh.. and don't feel safe just because you may use a USB keyboard. That's covered too.
-Grym
Exactly. It's an arms race, and one which you will lose. Your kids are younger, faster, and smarter than you. If they aren't already, they will be.
And yes, talk to them. No nanny is a substitute for proper parenting.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How does a teenager who has built and continues to maintain all PCs in the house block his parents from viewing pr0n, considering I don't have the ability to "sit and talk about it" and technical measures are not a solution to social problem?
1. Install something like OpenWRT on your router
2. Set up a proxy app like squid (with plugins) *on the router*
3. Set the proxy app to block out porn using one of many available blacklists or whitelists (google for it).
I think squid has a plugin that only lets you access sites from a search engine, and restricts the search engine to having safe search at full.
4. Block outgoing port 80 and 21 from your kids computer (on the router), or on all computers. If your kid really needs FTP (port 21) then you can whitelist
the IP addresses he needs (for example, whitelisting his school's ftp server if he needs to upload assignments)
5. Set up two passwords to view otherwise blocked sites on the proxy. Give one to him. Make sure he knows that you can get a list of all sites he accesses when he uses that password, so that he won't override a porn site.
Vehicle Stars used car search is my current project
If you install a sufficiently tricky filter/firewall, this kid might learn a lot about computers. He'll be highly motivated to figure out how it works and get around it. This could be the start of a great career in software for him!
If I had a teenager I wanted to keep away from naughty sites of one kind or another I would just drop into casual conversation a couple times that all of the sites visited by any of our computers is logged, and that I look at the log periodically "to look for anything suspicious make sure we're not getting hacked or sending out viruses or anything." You don't have to actually do anything, just leave your kid with the impression that you might be watching.
I know this one guy I work with has two kids about 13 or 14 and he doesn't have crack cocaine at home for just this very reason. He feels that the safest situation but completey ignores the fact that his kids have friends in the nieghbourhood and some if not all of them have crack cocaine.
?
Dang! A lot of work defeated by "dad, I'm going heelying with David. See you later!" David has a FIOS connection at his house, BTW.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Nothing's going to turn a kid off something faster -- especially sexual material -- than finding out his parent is interested in it too. [Attention clue-impaired hair-trigger paedo-police: this is a mild attempt at HUMOR.]
I piss off bigots.
"God, I hate people with avoidance issues."
"But I never would have bought it anyway!" Oh, wait! Wrong issue.
Otter Escaping North has this just right. This isn't a small problem. This is a parenting exercise and not a technical one.
For my kids, I have a router that blocks their access at individually scheduled times for each MAC address. I won't let them on the internet unless I'm awake. My rule to my children, regarding access, is that all browsing, IM and email are public to me. On a weekly basis, I walk in, have them get off their machine and see what they are doing.
Every now and then I catch them doing something in appropriate and they loose access for some length of time.
For the mother who ask, if she doesn't have the skill sets to manage router access, then put the computer in a common area of the house and check it regularly. Take the cords to bed with you and threaten severe punishment if the child powers the machine up with spare cords. If your worried about the child going to the other house, then go check out the other house. If the parents there aren't interested in watching their children, don't let them go.
Parenting is a way of life.
machinator omnis sine licentia
All your attitude will do is breed in the minds of your children the idea that might makes right, leading them in their adult lives to be subservient slaves to whoever holds any sort of power over them, and unaccountable dictators whenever they hold any sort of power over others. And yes, I would say that such descriptions fit most adults in most societies today (to varying degrees of course), and that that is precisely the root of the majority of sociological ills.
Alternatively, if your children are steadfast enough of mind to resist breaking under your threats and punishment, it could ingrain in them the idea that the world of full of malevolent assholes like you, a dog-eat-dog world where the only way to get by unscathed is to skillfully maneuver through social power hierarchies and amass as much control over other people as possible - in short, turning them into the very sociopaths you seem to fear them becoming. Or, if you and they both are lucky, they may recover from the psychological harm you inflict upon them once they move out on their own, and become fairly well-adjusted, independent individuals, though no doubt some sort of scarring will remain one way or another.
I'm not saying you can never say "no" to your kids. You don't have to give them everything they ask for; hell, you don't have to give them much of anything at all. You don't have to give them a computer period, or even let them use yours. All you have to give them is the same respect of rights you'd give any other person; which means that if you DO give them something (some property), it's theirs, and you should fuck off and not think they you can steal from them to punish them for doing things you don't approve of. Punish them for doing things that are genuinely wrong: stealing, hurting other people, that sort of thing. Beyond that, your only justified tool is education. Talk to them, reason with them, try to convince them that certain things are bad for them or impolite or what not, and if they don't listen, tough shit. Maybe you're wrong, maybe they're just stupid, either way the ball is in their court now, and even though they might go off and do some stupid shit, you violating their rights to try to deter them from that not only doesn't help anything, but is a worse offense than whatever they might do to "deserve" it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"I can't fathom not allowing my teenage son to view porn. It's the one great teenage pursuit. It's more productive than knocking up some 16 year old girl. That would be great parenting!"
Not as productive as sleeping with the teacher.
So many sitcom stories involve the teenager sneaking a cigarette or two. The parent, trying to teach the kid a lesson, makes the kid smoke several packs, if not an entire carton. The teenager gets very, very ill. Soon the teenager wants nothing whatever to do with cigarettes.
So, why not the same thing with porn? Make him masturbate 40 times. Hire a bunch of women to press boobs into him at all hours of the day. Expose him some curable VDs.
He won't like porn much after that.
Now, as for the psychological damage, well, you can be held responsible for that I think.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Nothing is fool proof, but you'll send the message that inappropriate content isn't "ok" in your house.
1) no computers in bedrooms
2) Kids are limited to computers in public locations
3) Router is secured with specific times that internet access is allowed for each PC. MAC filtering + a radius server and whatever else you want.
4) adult used PCs have strong passwords and are locked. Kids **never** use these.
5) public area PCs do not have built in networking
6) Kids accounts are less than "Power User" level.
7) Only USB networking is allowed - you keep the key.
Ok, with all this setup, whenever the kids need to get on the interweb, they have to ask you for the USB WiFi dongle.
Don't tell the kids anything about your setup - you are the all knowing parent. Check the router logs for sites visited or better, setup a proxy server on the adult PC and don't allow any direct interweb access except through that proxy. check the proxy logs.
Any male knows, don't trust your boys. They will see porn no matter what you do, but it doesn't have to be inside your home.
Oh, whenever the kids are on the interweb, you are in the room reading, watching tv, something. If you leave the room, you take the USB dongle with you. Every time, all the time. The dongle is locked in the same place you lock your firearm, since it is just as dangerous.
"I don't like the world. Is there any way to keep my child from seeing it?"
Step 1. Accept that you can only control the machines in your own home.
Step 2. Make sure all computers are in "public" areas of the house, where you can easily see what anyone is doing on them.
Step 3. Set up a Smoothwall router with the squid transparent proxy turned on and the Net filtering setup enabled.
Step 4. Do not allow your child to log on with anything other than a locked-down unprivileged account that cannot alter any system settings
Step 5. Do not let them have admin access to the computer, EVER.
Step 6. Deal with the inevitable conflicts and headaches that this will cause.
Alternate route:
Step 1. Accept that your child WILL access pornography no matter what you do.
Step 2. Raise your child with a solid moral and ethical background.
Step 3. Just be the best parent you can be.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I'm not a parent, but here's what I am thinking: We all have limited time. Everything we can do has a different priority or importance. So, we have to invest our time in whatever has the highest priority or return on investment (ROI). If educating your teenager about sexually transmitted diseases has a ROI of 100, then what is the ROI of controlling their access to online pornography at home? 1? 5? 10? Perhaps 15 at the maximum? If my gut feeling regarding these numbers is correct, then this means that the parent should first educate the teenager about STDs, then manage access to pornography, or at least do both at the same time (if you believe access to pornography ought to be managed), but surely not first deal with the pornography and later (or worse, never) with the STDs. There are some sites with information on educating teenagers on sexual issues, such as Scarleteen and places where your teenager can ask questions and get answers rom people who probably know much more than you, such as GoAskAlice.
cut his dick off, problem solved.
What is this? the middle ages?
"It may help to have an assistant hold the young athlete from behind. Alternatively, Purity Athletic also provides various restraints for use with those young men who have not developed the self-discipline necessary during this procedure."
I am disgusted.
"This web site is Copyright © 1997-20002 by Purity Athletic, Inc. All rights reserved. Viriguard is a work of fiction. Resemblance to any existing athletic supporter, chastity belt, or sporting goods manufacturer is purely coincidental. No boys have been interviewed or fitted with a Viriguard. Research into actual Viriguard devices for adults is ongoing. In the mean time, if you need a real chastity belt, be at least eighteen years old and see Carrara. Letters sent to Viriguard become the property of Viriguard and may be published. "
it's fake
I don't work for or make commission from them, but I have used and recommend SafeEyes. Configurable. It keeps logs and blocks what you want, based on various criteria. You can even have it text message you if an account has too many hits. You can different accounts for different people. I believe it is prudent for parents to at least remain aware of what the kids are doing online. I have already had one young relative run away and meet someone they met online. Kids needs parents and sometimes parents need to set fences, or, again, at least be aware. I am sure there are ways around safeeyes but as pointed out in earlier posts, the arms race will at least make for more informed computer users :-)
if a kid really wants to see pR0n, he will get his hands on it- does anyone really think that if a 10 year old sees some depiction of sex that they will be forever scarred (hell, I found my dad's porno stach when I was 10 and it didn't mess me up)? In many other cultures kids are exposed to nudity and are taught about sex and nothing ever comes of it. Besides if I put myself in that place when I was like 10 years old, pR0n was really not in the forefront of my mind, I couldn't appreciate it till at least a couple of years later (and so what if your 14-16 year old kid is looking @ pR0n- it is better than them getting the neighbor girl pregnant or as a # of friends from high school did- go to hookers and get the clap or worse), if there was an internet back then and I ran into a porn site I prolly would have just said eww and not gone back there. I mean granted I wouldn't say "son, let's look at some fisting" or encourage them to have sex when they are too young but it is really just another bible thumping conservative lockdown of people telling you how kids should be raised, what is right, what is wrong and demonizing people for not thinking the same way.
As a parent and an IT manager I would LOVE an option to receive filtered access from my ISP. Once it enters your house there is nothing you can do if your kid or his friends are determined and clever. I know there are small, private ISPs that provide filtered internet but why don't the big ones like Verizon, Cox, etc. have it as an option? I don't want to pay Integrity or someone else like that on top of my normal DSL bill.
But I have to wonder why kids looking at porn is such a big deal in the first place.
How do you identify a troll on Slashdot? They're modded +5, Insightful.
1. It's actually pretty healthy for kids to look at porn, I would be worried if they didn't to be honest. If you've raised your kids correctly and they're aware of the Bird and the Bees you probably don't have anything to worry about. :-) Being open and honest about it is the best option here, if it's something they understand they're less likely to get in trouble over it.
:)
2. There's really no substitute for actually being a part of your kids lives, which includes taking an interest in what they're doing online. Yes, that means you have to communicate with them occasionally. Which means you randomly show up in their room from time to time to see what they're up too. They're much likely to go searching for stuff they shouldn't if they know you're going to be spending quality time online with them. Right?
3. I run a blocker for when my nieces and nephews are using the computer simply to err on the side of caution (they're not old enough to have the responsibility to not accidentally click on something they should not be seeing):
- Install a web filter and force all clients on your network to go through it using a firewall. There's some good free ones out there, Dan's Guardian is one of the best. Weblocker is good also if you don't have a UNIX box handy.
Don't forget web sites do exclusively listen on ports 80 and 443!
- Dans guardian works better if you wrap it around Squid
- Use Squid to filter out what the content filter misses
Put the power cord in your car's trunk when you're not looking over their shoulder :) Parenting is about teaching your kids, so take the time to educate them about responsible use. Just saying 'you can't because I say so' is not parenting, and there's no better way for your teenager to take it as a challenge.
I'd be among the first to say that there's no way to make it completely foolproof. That said, I have some reasonable confidence in the setup in my home.
The kids each have their own PCs (nothing fancy, not for the latest games by a long shot, more than adequate for homework, web, and older games) with static private IPs. They all feed to the firewall between the home LAN and the DMZ. That has squid and dansguardian running on it for the web, and pretty much everything else is firewalled. Email is via my mail server in the DMZ. Of course there's another (NAT'ed) firewall between the DMZ and the internet. (I have a stack of old P-133 low profile Dells that I picked up for $15 each, perfectly adequate to run an older and stripped down distro of Linux on, just add a cheap NIC to the built-in for the firewalls, and a larger disk drive for the proxy and email.)
The kids also know I can read the logs (not that I bother). There's nothing to physically prevent them from trying to hack in to the servers, of course, but it'll be a few years before they have that kind of skill (at which point I probably won't be much worried about them dl'ing porn.)
Finally, the computers aren't private -- the kid's computers are all in one of the family rooms.
I know this won't completely protect them from what's on line, but at least they'll be forced to do what I did at their age and find their porn at a friend's house.
-- Alastair
And WHY would you NOT want your teenager looking at this stuff?
Please answer truthfully.
(make no mistake- I have 3 kids- now adults, and I've never used this "Nutninny" software)
So far my offspring haven't turned out to be homicidal sex perverts.
But of course only time will tell. Right?
Ah, "America!" You are always so... umm, interesting.
.
- aqk
F U
At the moment I funnel all traffic thru dansgaurdian and tinyproxy on a Linux box. My kids are only young (6 years old for the oldest) and she's already on the net (Barbie sites etc etc).. I'm pretty relaxed about things, but the one area that has me spooked is chat rooms etc (there's been an incident in our immediate family that has me this way..not paranoia). The good thing about dansgardian is the granularity of control it offers...I can stop access to a lot of areas without too much hassle and I can easliy relax the restrictions as time goes on... When the kids are older I will back off the controls and give them more freedoms, but #1 on the things to do list is talk to them about the responsibilities that come along with that. By the time the kids are old enough to try to defeat the system to look at porn I hope that we'll be at a stage where theres at least SOME element of trust between us..... but at the age they are now, I'LL have the parental controls cranked right up...
Burma?
How to bypass EVERY filtering engine out there...
SSH tunneling...
Use an RDP client...
VPN to internet based host...
Host file hacks...
Proxy viewers like google...
You can't stop a determined person from viewing stuff online. So, change the person, not the technology...
My rebel kid found my whitelist router a little hard to get past. When he was grounded, the connection passed IP addresses for the school site and nothing else. Hosts hacks would have failed to resolve. (No admin privileges) Direct IP entry was null routed. SSH tunneling and proxy viewers were far and few in the whitelist. VPN also null routed.
School work inproved after a tantrum on the restrictions.
The truth shall set you free!
So then lets apply a social solution.
Keep logs of all activity, and check them for any activity involving anything you personally deem to be undesirable. The first child to view pornography is to be locked in their room with other children and beaten. The next child is to be shot. The next is to be put to work in slavery until starvation etc...
It worked quite well for one guy i know, cant think of his name.
Because seriously, the human race lives for one purpose, procreation. This is a stronger drive than even survival. And look at what people have been willing to do to survive throughout history. How do you propose we stop people from the one urge they exist to have?
Perhaps you should be asking why you want to stop it at all?
every scientific study ever done has shown children with access to pornography have had no adverse effects from it. small children exhibit disinterest, older children exhibit mild curiosity and teenagers will embrace it. If they get the wrong ideas about sex/relationships that becaus of a lack of sex education.
you claim to know the answers because you are a parent yourself, you people. but you readily admit you saw pornography as a teenager yourself! does this not mean that your urge to stop porn could be a result of psychological harm from viewing pornography? your position is illogical and indefensible.
and being a parent does not give you any more philosphical or psychological authority on the topic than any other slashdot nerd. your opinions and annecdotal insight are not scientific fact. especially since you dont have any, you havent let them see it yet. you cannot claim the effects it will any more than i, a childless single person can, because you have not children that had be harmed by pornography. in case you didnt notice most people are idiots, and they grew up learning from parents just like you.
i would personally much rather have my children voluntarily reading slashdot than perezhilton.
also heres an interesting thought. lets assume people reading slashdot are fairly intelligent folk with technical knowledge. therefore they have had access to pornography, hate speech, goatse, tubgirl and everything else on the internet from the youngest age. They read technology and science news, are politically active and tend to fairly morally balanced. If the stereotype is to be believed they RARELY have sex.
most people i know without this technical knowledge, who have never seen the likes of goatse, (i'm 20), spend their days talking fashion, celebrities and getting drunk. Their favorite sites are myspace and celebrity gossip sites. My friend complained to me the other day that he hasnt had sex in nearly a week. He certainly fits into this crowd. he has no idea the things i have seen. others do drugs on a regular basis. i know a couple that do and almsot never use the internet, and never have.
i think you see what im getting at here. unless you can provide soem evidence for your position, your position should be reconsidered.
in closing, can i please have some responses from parents with children or the people themselves WHO HAVE BEEN SIGNIFICANTLY NEGATIVELY IMPACTED BY PORNOGRPAHY, GOATSE TYPE THINGS, OR OTHER SUCH 'HARMFUL' MATERIAL?
No need to talk about mrhands
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
i forgot to add, my friend that complained about lack of sex that does drugs on a regular basis has extremely strict christian parents. he didnt have internet access until he was 18 and was forced to attend church well into his teens.
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
It looks like you've done detailed research on pr0n. May I join your project?
...and set whatever controls at the switch. The CNet CNIG-914 4-port broadband router, for example, has in its arsenal, a URL and IP filter. Set a strong password which is unguessable without an incremental dictionary attack and be 95% confident that Kiddo won't be getting hold of any of his regular haunts any more. Unless he manages to bypass the router (try burying it in the wall). Alternatively, just lay down the law to him. Tell him what he can and can't do. IF he breaks the rules, remove his account. Works for my kids. My eldest only broke the rules once. He spent the next four months thinking about it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Set the router to use OpenDNS. You can configure the parental controls to apply to anyone on your IP address. So even if he brings his friend's computer over, he won't be able to get on teh pr0n sites. Unless of course he plugs directly into the modem, or resets the router. But if the router gets reset, you will notice. And hopefully it will take him a while to figure out that it is the router that is doing the filtering. Any software installed on a computer is worthless and can be easily bypassed. You could also set up a computer as a firewall and use SmoothWall, which can log any site that's been accessed (and even IM conversations, for the extremely paranoid). If he knows everything he does will be documented, he will probably be very hesitant to visit any bad sites. (Some routers even have basic keyword filtering and logging built in. You can check that too.) Although, no matter what you do, you can't stop him from going over Billy's to look at his secret stack of Playboys under his mattress. A nice talk with him is most definitely a must, but you can use the above info to make sure your bandwidth isn't being used for devious purposes.
www.opendns.com
www.smoothwall.org
(both free)
A quick recollection of friend's high school stories (and addmittedly personal memories) leads me to believe that putting your family computer in a traversed location does not decrease porn usage in a family, but SHARPLY increases...um.. awkward late night social encounters. Yeah, there's a lot of email* to check at 3am. On a positive note it hones the art of secretive silent ninja-baitin' for when you really need it- college.
Get to know your kids better.
Booting another OS for internet purposes proves to be trivially easy these days, even without access to the BIOS--virtual machines are fast enough to support linux for browsing. If microsoft.com is not blocked, downloading Virtual PC and setting it up to run damn small linux or any other live cd is no problem at all.
The only way to prevent surfing to unwanted sites is dedicated hardware for whitelisting with an integrated modem to prevent simply disconnecting it from the network. But this is stupid, as it totally destroys internet experience. I'd do this for a public information terminal in a company, but not for a computer at home used by a teen.
Monitoring is a way I wouldn't want to go, as it invades privacy and can also be circumvented. I'd rather set up a VPN to a friend's house than have my internet activities monitored, not because I'd do anything forbidden, but just because I *do* value my privacy.
to tell you. My parents did this to me when I was a kid. It never worked and only made me hate them. Now it's years later and I'm no longer a teenager but they're going in a home when they get old.
I'm an awful person and I hate myself every day.
I just made room for you on my friends list. Good show, sir.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I'm sure most on this forum will disagree with my post, but it is a real attempt to answer the question. The moral questions of this can be debated endlessly, but here goes...
A consultant by trade, I had one of my clients ask the same question and gave them the same answer. But offered the best solution I could come up with.
Here is what I did. Setup a small PC running Kerio Winroute Firewall with the Content Filter option. Very easy to setup and configure, and uses the best filter IMO. But expect to pay, Firewall is $499, and the content filter add-on is $249, add this together plus the cost of a small pc. Also keep in mind that the filter will have to be renewed yearly at about $149/yr. Another cool feature you can add on is McAfee AV scanning all network traffic.
Locked it inside a cabinet along with the cable modem. (be sure it is a low power PC, Sempron or Celeron that can tolerate the lack of ventilation, it only needs 256MB ram and the lowest powered low-end cpu you can find. The new run-cool WD HDDS are a plus here too. This prevents bypassing the firewall by physically connecting the pc to the cable modem.
Set the filter to block:
Erotic/Sex
Pornography
Extreme or whatever else you want. Since it is a corporate firewall, there are dozens of other categories to block.
Turn on all http logging and share the log folder as read only so everyone in the family has access to the logs.
Trained mom and dad what to look for in the logs, and also showed it to their kids. Kids knowing that anyone can see what pages they have been to keeps them from searching for 'naughty' things.
Even with all of these settings, I would say it is only 80% effective at blocking porn. But the logs are untouchable, revealing, and can be viewed by anyone in the family.
Granted most teens will find a way around this, such as finding an open WiFi in their neighborhood, or goto their friends house. But at least it is was a way for parents to control their own internet.
I don't 100% agree with this, when I was a teen I enjoyed privacy and trust from my parents. My parents talked with me about these things and we had a mutual trust. No filter on the planet will replace good parenting IMO. But I can see the need for such measures in some situations, but that can be debated forever as well.
Linux on a thumb drive using TOR to browse. A slow way to get your pr0n, to be sure. Probably easier to just cadge pr0n from his classmates using thumb drives or DVDs.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You can also combine it with various browser's (IE & Opera have this, not sure about FF/Mozilla) "restricted sites lists" in combination with it as well, in case the kid "gets-wise" to using a custom blocking HOSTS file alone & create a "dual layered" method of blocking sites whose content is objectionable.
APK
Take a screwdriver and mangle the hell out of the ethernet port(s). Then set up the whole house to use only wireless.
Then, it'll *never* work with Linux. Done!
We also have web sites that portray them selfs as art sites,safe for children so they say,like deviantart. But allow children as young as 13 the option to view mature content on there site. This mature content, there so called Artistic Nudity Gallery and Fetish Gallery is loaded with explicit posing,actual sex acts,simulated sex acts,homosexuality,lesbianism. I have seen beer cans inserted in female genitalia and tons of erections. Deviantart has NO control over the content that is uploaded by there members,and can take more then a week to remove violations if at all. What should be done about web sites that obviously allow underage children to view this kind of content. Granted you must be a member to view mature content tagged material, but alot of content is uploaded that is mature content that is not marked with a mature content tag, Accidentally or on purpose. Why isn't a site like this forced to remove or even allowed to give that option to children?? When i was a teen the only porn i could get my hands on was if i found it outside by the railroad tracks or down by the river. The mens magazines were always behind the counters in a brown wrapper.
Jack of all trades,master of none
This dialog on /. does a better job of supporting the first point you made for her than anything else I've seen, and a lot of the responses align really well with what happened in my house. Our son is 13, so we've had our own chance to tackle the parents vs. porn issue.
From that, I'd echo a lot of what's said here. You can't stop 'em - you have to teach 'em. It's not that different from parenting on any other tough topic (drugs, sex in the real world, etc.). I think what a lot of these posts reflect, though, is that the environment you create for your kids' internet access can help you teach.
Putting the hardware in a public place (our family computer's on a desk in the kitchen), makes an occasional over-the-shoulder check easy, so when you find the kid at a gaming site or an on-line forum you get an instant opportunity to talk about privacy and safety issues. When they're at sites that may have some borderline content, you get an excuse to explain what's OK to look at and what isn't. You don't have to watch them every second to get those points across. Checking the browser history on the machine and not hesitating to discuss what you see there with your kid creates another opportunity.
While we tried a few different approaches in our house, knowing full well they could be circumvented (notably Cybersitter, and a Netgear router with a parental controls feature from TrendMicro which well and truly sucked), what works in the end for us is this:
This, after a few failed attempts at other methods, actually seems to work. Sure, he could hack his way through it, but so far we have the impression that he's really getting a grip on why he shouldn't do that. He's also got some sense of what kind of torment he'll be in if he were to be caught doing so. The fences we've put up aren't impenetrable, but they do help to show where the boundaries are. Breaking past them would require a determined and intentional violation of trust.
For what it's worth, the most effective case we've been able to make with him so far seemed to be right after he got busted for the second time. He'd seen some moderately nasty stuff (briefly), and we had a chance to explain in detail just why we wanted him to stay away from it. Our major point was that while the stuff exists, kids don't have a frame of reference to put it in, and need to stay away from it until they do. That probably sounds a little trite, but I swear it seemed to help.
This thread's become a great resource already. I plan to bookmark it and share it with the next person who asks me the same question that your boss did.
... and ten minutes later the kid is looking at porn when he notices a neighbor's open wifi.
And if you don't have a wifi network, the kid picks up one of these set to client mode and still finds the neighbor's open wifi. And you won't know about it because he keeps it hidden along with a USB key he stores the 'good stuff' on.
You can't stop it. What you're fighting against here isn't just the kid. You're fighting against the entire computer industry, pda industry and cell phone industry. These companies are highly motivated to connect their customers and make it easy because it sells.
You can do it by having the parent supervise the child's online activities. We're not talking about monitoring every URL and IM that passes about, but keep the PC in a room used by multiple people and keep an eye on it. This will probably also reduce the chances of shitware getting onto the system.
People looking for a technological solution to a social problem have already got a faulty preconception of how to tackle the issue.
If the parent is not willing to supervise their offspring's activities, then they will be able to not only access pornography, but also content that is (to my mind) far more distasteful: racial hate sites and the like.
F_T
teens can do lots of things parents, and
laws, don't want them to.
why waste time isolating one and using a computer
method for prevention?
If your parental technique is "if I find you doing
it I beat the crap out of you" then do that.
If you're more sophisticated in your parenting, or
are concerned about the child abuse laws in your
country, do whatever other techniques you have
in your parenting arsenal.
If the problem is just "detection", well hell
that's easy. It's easier to detect surfing porn
than a lot of other things teens do.
Maybe that's
the real issue, it's more in your face, so you
can't pretend it's not happening.
Or maybe it's not the teen, but her husband that's
surfing all the porn sites, so she can't
use her standard arsenal?
I guess it doesn't really matter. Darwin will
probably take care of this broken relationship
when the kid takes himself out at 120mph on
a curvy road some nite, or some other thing
he's not supposed to be doing.
My suggestion would be to have a series of allowed sites stored on the router. So the PC can go to say USAToday, CNN, Encyclopedia Britanica, Dictionary.com, and other sites that the parents suggest are appropriate. If the child needs to access something not on the list, then he has to ask first and get the parent to allow that site. Then the change is made at the router to allow him to view the site. So provided that you have good passwords on both the PC and the Router, it should be hard for anyone to break through to the internet.
It's not 100%, but it's doable, and it would make finding accidental porn harder. As added bonuses, it's going to be hard for him to download that cool game that's loaded with virii and spyware (something you definately DO NOT want on your business PC). It's done more commonly in business where you might need internet, but you don't want them to waste time at IGN rather than doing business on the business computer.
Get them a lapdance, eerhm, a laptop. Problem solved, no more porn on the shared computer.
Make your main machine a laptop, and take it with you to work every day.
Your next problem will be dealing with his request for a substantial increase in allowance...
And as much as children can bypass proxy servers and so forth, parents do terrible things in the name of safety that their children are powerless to escape.
Case in point: I heard a lengthy interview with a Canadian couple on the radio this week. They used to live in Toronto, work 9-5 jobs, and have a nice happy life. Then the wife saw a news story about a girl who went missing a few miles from their home, and she followed the coverage over the next couple of days as the girl's body parts were found scattered across the city. So the family moved to a town in BFE with a few hundred residents and no jobs. It's a wonderful place to raise kids, she says. Oh, sure, they have less money, and the father is gone ten months out of the year because he has to commute to the Alberta oil fields, which is a three hour plane ride. When dad is called to work, they wake the kid up at 2:30am to ride with them to the airport, which is a 2 1/2 hour drive. Their marriage is falling apart, and they have to sleep in separate beds when he's home because they're so used to sleeping alone. The kid is having problems because his friends all have (unemployed) dads who come to their birthday parties and little league games.
Would she consider moving back to Toronto? No way, she says. Toronto is too dangerous.
That's child abuse. Now, I'm not saying it should be illegal, or we should force the parents into counseling or anything. It's their choice. But it's abuse.
This is late and so will probably be buried, but just in case the original poster reads all of the comments...
1. As many have mentioned, put the computer in a public area.
2. Blocking is hard. Monitoring is easy, if you're willing to invest the time in reviewing the results (you should be). There are numerous ways to hack this together, but if you want an "off-the-shelf" system to recommend, SpectorSoft's stuff works well. It is host based. The nice thing about monitoring software of this kind is that, while the kid might be able to disable it, you can tell that it's been disabled. I don't view this as spying, since the kids know it's happening.
3. Consider that they may have Internet access at friend's houses. That's why it's really important to know the parents of your kid's friends, and be willing to ask potentially awkward questions about the level of supervision when they are visiting, both in general and specifically related to TV / movies, games, computer and Internet access.
-R
Ash,
Everyone is different and in your case, the lure of gaming lead to a career in technology. Thats great.
So should your parents have just thrown in the towel and let you play games without having to work for it? Would you be a better person for them having given in to your juvenile urges? Were your parents cruel and vindictive tyrants?
Probably not.
You probably didn't turn out so bad and their attempts to demonstrate family values, didn't hurt you.
By the way, my kids, who aren't interested in technology at all have been told that if they could circumvent my internet restrictions, (spoof MACs) then they could have unfettered access. This was sort of a learn technology carrot that they aren't interested in. Go figure.
Good luck with your own kids.
machinator omnis sine licentia
The mom is justifiably concerned, and the son's exploration is perfectly normal. The only way to handle it is to maintain communication and TALK to her son about what is acceptable and what is not. She needs to let him know that what he is doing is normal curiosity, but there need to be limits and responsibility exercised.
Put the PC in the living room. Let them have their own PC if they want, but it's in the living room.
It has been shown for many reasons not to put a computer (or even a TV) in the child's bedroom.
Yes, there will be times you won't be there and they can go and look up porn. Simply log all internet sites visited by the kid. Wait until a couple of days later and ask "Did you find anything worth looking at when you were looking at hotpornsite.xxx?".
If the kid isn't computer literate, they won't even know how you found out. If they are, you shouldn't expect to outsmart them at their game. In that case, just threaten to cancel the net if they don't stop. Also, come home earlier unexpectedly a few times a month.
No software in the world replaces a parent.
Aside from my personal ideas about censorship and about conservative views on parenting ("if we don't tell him about it, he'll never find out"), the big question is how much effort is this worth? Realistically, (especially since most kids know a lot more about computers than their parents, on average) the more controls you add, the more a kid will want to beat them, just because he can.
Ignoring for the moment that I know plenty of 18, 25, 30, and even 50 year olds who seem to have difficulties making adult decisions, imagine what it means to have a newborn. This "child", if you want to call it that, cannot do anything but eat, sleep, poop, and pee. And even those all require parental facilitation. It's an enormous continuum, between total dependence and total independence, and figuring out when and how to dole out freedoms and responsibilities CORRECTLY is a fickle art. The answer is different for every child, and the consequences of parental failure are very real.
Parental monitoring can be even more important. Kids' fearlessness is essential to their development of new skills like walking, swimming, biking, etc., but it can also get them into trouble. They don't know what can maim them and what cannot, and it is essential for parents to monitor the child and to say, "Yes, do that. It's ok." or "No, don't do that. You'll end up in the hospital or morgue." The internet is just information, and I think you underestimate your childrens ability to accept it as such This is simply wrong. Children's brains wire up over time to the point that "information is just information" but it is not so from the beginning. Don't believe me? Show a 4 year old a violent movie and see if you can get him to go to bed. You can tell him over and over that the violence was pretend. Heck, you could bring the actual actors into the child's room to say that they are fine and it was just pretend, but the fact of the matter is, you are going to have a terrified, crying child in your bed for the next week or two.
Don't get me wrong, I recoil at the common wisdom here that says, "Put the computer in the living room". Kids communicate by IM now and they need to be able to communicate privately. When I was a kid, I didn't accept my parents listening in on my telephone conversations. Likewise, I do not monitor my kids' IM communications. That would be wrong.
But at the same time, free reign on the Internet is one of those freedoms that needs to be granted, but the foundation of responsibility must be taught first.
It's difficult for someone who has no children to appreciate what I am saying. You've never been totally responsible for the life and well being of other human beings, and it's impossible to imagine what that's like before doing it. I've explained it as best I can.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
First off, I don't think that blocking access is going to work. You need to porovide the impression to the children that their activities are being watched. My home network runs with a Netgear router that has various firewall settings, in conjunctoion with the ability to log locally or to a syslog server.
The simplest thing to do then, is the best: make sure that all household traffic gooes through a router that the kids DO NOT have the passwords to. Log remote sitenames. And manually check the resulting lists for objectional material.
Relying on tools that must be installed on the PCs to be monitored is not going to work.
Simply lever up the letters "p" , "o", "r", "n" (and probably "x" as well) from the keyboard and hide them in your purse. Problem solved.
That's so true! They are making money and lots of it. Plenty to maake stronger connections and easier access no matter age.
Oh, you can make bypassing almost impossible for most people, if you're willing to deny some legitimate services also, as well as advanced services (like FTP) not used by the casual computer user, who just does surfing.
Filtering on a home machine is by definition oppressive. It is by definition harmful. I don't like it. But even if I think it's a detrimental choice: if parents make the choice, its theirs to make.
I think of filtering more as a type of severe punishment, since it hurts legitimate activity. It's what should be available if the kid has decided to ignore the rules for computer usage. No worries about them using a friend's computer at this time, because the kid is grounded, and won't be allowed to visit friends while subject to filtering: this is just a way of extending their sentence to the computer world (without cutting them off entirely).
Of course, the kid will still need access to the computer for certain educational activities -- however, most (maybe all) internet access may be blocked, most entertainment sites/games will be blocked, as well as porn.
As a side-effect, to implement effective filtering at any level, you also deny your kid the ability to use the home machine as a tool to learn much about computer technology. Running one OS only gives a limited view: it's good enough for reading about various subjects, but not good enough for the kid to learn much about computers.
Alternative OSes should not be off limits. It's very sad to deny a kid the ability to experiment with Linux or BSD, et al., just because there won't be some stupid NetNanny application.
Alternatively, don't give the kid a GUI, don't allow them access to good enough hardware to run a GUI. If their system is physically incapable of running different OSes, you have no worries about them hacking your BIOS password. I.E. they will surf the web using Lynx. They will write reports for class using pico or vi, because EMACS uses too much memory. They will not have X available on their 586 with 16 Megs of RAM and their CGA/EGA video card with ~16Kb video memory won't provide much display detail.
When I was 12 or younger, I "hacked" this program. It was as simple as copying the text of a key program file to the clipboard, deleting it in the file, surfing porn for as long as I desired, and pasting the text back into the file after I was done.
Most kids, though, won't realize/notice what's happening if you install a simple keylogger. Hell, adults don't even notice when that happens (speaking from personal experience).
Of course, most parents feel compelled to tell the kids about the monitoring software. Still, there are ways to disguise and hide the program folder so that your average preteen isn't going to find it. I mean, most kids wouldn't even think of doing something like installing a second OS -- and if they did, you'd probably notice the extra partition and be immediately suspicious.