Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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:
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..."
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.
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)
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.
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.
I really don't get that at all. What do these people think will happen if these kids run across some porn? I know this one guy I work with has two kids about 13 or 14 and he doesn't have internet access 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 internet access. It seems to me if you rasie your kids right they should be able to handle just about anything they comeacross without completey falling apart. It worked OK for me.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
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.
No, sorry most porn is something like www.someurl.com/somefolder/some girl name/some set name/number.jpg All the porn I have ever seen never has xxx in it. I guess you could search for .jpg but it is still a lot of work. I think just talking to your child is the best thing to do. But who has time for that these days?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
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 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.
I really don't get that at all. What do these people think will happen if these kids run across some porn?
Indeed. Before the internet, we'd sneak a look at our dad's (or a friend's dad's/big brother's) stash of Playboys.
I'm pretty sure my childhood friends didn't suffer any psychological damage from it.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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.
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?
My pups aren't teenagers (which really means anything from 13 to 19 - and can warrant very different actions in terms of guidance), but as a parent who thinks of himself as responsible (and pretty liberal, frankly), let me tell you; yeah. It's pretty much me vs. the world, and I'm constantly paranoid about what other information is burrowing its way into their mind and taking root.
If you've raised kids, you'll know that they are sponges and there's no way to predict what's gonna take hold and what they're going to ignore.
There's a lot more to be cautious of on the internet than porn; and let's not forget that there IS porn on there that is about as far away from healthy sexual curiosity as you can get. There's also scams, fraud, malware, etc, etc, etc...and we can throw in the predator thing - although the media has blown that out of several proportions.
There are many aspects of a child's education that are the parent's responsibility; and do not fall into the normal school curriculum. Media education (including the internet), in my opinion, is HUGE. I'm expecting to spend enormous effort on it. How to perceive television and movies; fiction versus reality, how to look at advertising critically, and now that the news has become infotainment I've gotta try and figure out how to encourage a healthy interest in the world around them while at the same time explaining they can't take anything said by anyone at face value. Then there's the internet, which is a whole other category.
First, I've gotta spend a lot of time explaining how to use it safely - before we even get in to what to do and what not to. Safe browsing's gonna be a little more than just "don't sit so close." Malware, spam, phishing, trojans, cookies, privacy, internet permanence, and explaining there is no such thing as total anonymity -- and we're not even doing anything interesting yet.
So, frankly, if a parent isn't worried - I'm not sure they're doing they're job.
Yeah, obviously responsible people of good conscience will disagree about the appropriateness of a lot of internet material - but there is some stuff that I'm pretty sure we can almost all agree on, and I'd value reliable tools that help me prevent that from exposure. I'm not trying to keep the kid from seeing tits - but I am trying to keep them safe.
My planned approach? Start with pretty locked down access (I've got a router and the skills to more or less pull that off), open it up over time as they learn and mature, and I'm going to monitor what they do. You're freakin' right I am. That doesn't mean I'm going to pour over every mail, and I'm certainly not going to do it secretly. They're going to know I'm watching from the time they start using the internet; I'm going to tell them, and I'm going to tell them it's gonna happen at school and work, and throughout the rest of their accessing lives.
That approach is not to be taken lightly, obviously. I view it like watching the kids at the playground. Watching to keep them safe, occasionally telling them to 'stop that or you'll break your neck', is not the same as jumping in and managing the kids every time they tussle over a toy, or argue about who is 'it.' It can't be a mechanism for trying to make them behave the way I want them to. I'll have to be an adult about it; I can't read every mail, and I can't come down on them because they call me an ass as they IM to their friends. And yeah, there's screw all I can do if they're at someone else's home.
If the woman in question doesn't have the skills or time for that - she can use some software, ask the ISP to block stuff, let the mail provider filter the spam; and she has to accept that it's going to be an imperfect situation.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
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
Its comments like this one that need a -1 Disgusting mod.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
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.
So you want a domain for all porn sites. Who decides what's porn? The internet covers the planet. Some countries don't have a problem with a womans breasts, while others say you can't look at a womans body at all. Can you define porn? Would you say images of genitalia? What about the statue of David? Where do you draw the line between porn and art? What would happen to someone who posted porn on a non-xxx domain? Who do you want to police the internet?
Comcast doesn't "rely on porn for their profits." They simply provide a service. Internet Access. Nothing is going to block 100% of porn, and that's why they don't offer it as an option. What do you think would happen the first time some holy roller walked in on their son rubbin' one out to some porn that managed to get through the filter? They'd get sued. So they don't try. They leave it up to parents to make sure the kids don't surf inappropriate material.
And the snide remark about their cable lineup? What the hell? They just pick what stations to broadcast in their packages, and that's mostly driven my consumer demand. The stations create the content, Comcast just makes those stations available to you. You want them to drop Fox because there are too many adult situations? Or are you referring to actual porn channels? because last time i checked those had to be requested, they weren't exactly part of basic cable.
ug, you made me defend comcast. i feel dirty.
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
I'd mod you up if I had the points. That was very well-written.
Appreciated, though when I re-read it, I think I fell into the trap of overusing the word "safe." I stand by what I said about how I plan to handle the internet thing, and safety is certainly an issue - but I meant to talk more about managing the introduction of what's out there, and educating them on how to approach/avoid/process it.
It can be hard for a parent (well, me) to keep objective and separate what is an actual threat to their child from what, frankly, they're just not ready to handle yet...then of course there's what we parents are not ready for them to handle yet. ;>
Putting too much of that material under the category of "safety" is what leads to things like the "thinkofthechildren" meme. Images of hysterical parents condemning everything is certainly fair criticism, but for those of you without little ones, please believe me when I say that it's an incredibly hard job, with more nuance than can realistically be managed perfectly, and you often feel like you've got the whole multi-billion media industry against you.
I want to raise intelligent, critical, reasoned people with healthy egos, tempered consumer appetites, and the skills to thrive in the good times and cope in the bad times. Play about five minutes of television in opposition to that, and please forgive my momentary impulse to board up the windows.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
I (speaking for a lot of the libertarian single geek males on slashdot I'm sure) will stick up for what I believe in.. namely that censorship is wrong. This includes censorship "for their own good" even when dealing with child development. ESPECIALLY when dealing with child development. Are you seriously going to raise your kids with the philosophy of total lack of privacy and "someone's always watching?" That's a totally dystopian idea, and it's horrifying to hear that you'll force your kids to accept it! Privacy is a right, and while a healthy amount of parental discretion is available in enforcing household rules by looking at logs and things, you shouldn't be telling them "from the day you're born to the day you die someone's watching, so get used to it." Rather teach your kids that privacy is the ideal, the right thing, and that evil men have taken it away, and take that perspective to telling your kids someone's watching. The reality is that you have no privacy, but that's not how it should be, and that's not how it needs to be. Nothing will change if parents like you bring up the next generation accepting no privacy, taking DRM for granted, and thinking it funny that their parents owned their own computers not controlled by trusted computing vendors. et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, I don't know what you're worrying about. The internet is just information, and I think you underestimate your childrens ability to accept it as such, and not instantly open the windows of their souls and suck in 4chan and suddenly become real life /b/tards. Evaluate whether you're being controlled by offspring protection instincts, and also re-read Ender's Game. They were only 9. And I'm sure no kid is going to turn into a twitchy pulp of catatonia at seeing rose de nose's desk screen.
"She has sexual hangups and doesn't personally care for porn so she's projecting this on her son."
Wow, how much did you pay for your psychology degree?
The first part of your post is pretty much on the money. Then you got to this point, and totally lost it.
A concerned parent is a GOOD thing, regardless of their technical naivetee. Being later than she should have been (and how much later--is he 13 or 17?) isn't ideal, but she's trying to deal with things. Accusing her of having sexual hangups and disliking porn as a result is total and utter conjecture on your part.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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...
yes, and how many kids do you have, exactly? and your justification for being right is based on fictional characters in a sci-fi novel? Please, STFU. You are clueless.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
What we did for a friend of mine who has two young teenage boys was we set up a transparent proxy with logging. The house rules are "no looking at stuff that you think I'd be annoyed about". You can easily tell if a dodgy link has been clicked on and then surfed away from, or if it's part of a bit of exploration of dodgy sites. Of course, if they crack root on the proxy server and zap the logs, well that just shows initiative and fair play to them.
The other thing, of course, is not to be such a neo-puritan prude.
"So, frankly, if a parent isn't worried - I'm not sure they're doing they're job."
You will probably not think that I am doing my job. I have two kids, 15 and 10 and I am not worried in the least about what they will find on the internet. Both of them have run across porn and both of them quickly ignored it. The younger one thought it was gross and the elder one did not wish to see it.
While I am checking their computer for spyware, malware and other baddies, I do look through their browser histories and such but they have no idea that I check such things. All of their online activities are 100% innocent even without the fear of me monitoring them.
I trust my kids 100% but I do know that children can make mistakes which is why I check sometimes. I have taught my children about all sorts of things and let them explain to me how it could affect them. I tell them they can do anything they want and they turn around and limit themselves even more than I would limit them if I were an authoritarian parent.
At their ages, I was always rebelling against my parents. I swore I would never be like my parents and it has paid off in spades. My kids get excellent grades, A- is the lowest for the 15 year old and a B is the lowest for my 10 year old. All of their teachers have always complimented me on how courteous and hard working both children are. Both children are well disciplined and never do anything (major/serious) that I would not want them to do. Most importantly though, both of them love and trust me. They know that they can talk to me about _anything_ even if it is embarrassing or against the rules.
A web filter is bad parenting in my book. The real world does not censor itself and showing your kids a censored world will only hurt them by limiting their view/knowledge. Murderers, child molesters, thieves, etc do not perform their crimes only on other bad people. They perform their crimes on innocent people too. Better yet, innocent people make great targets because an innocent person does not know what to look for or know how to defend themselves. When they run across bad stuff make sure that your kids can, and will want to, talk to you about it so you can provide the knowledge that they need to get along in this world.
Teach your children properly and you will have less to worry about. (kind of like the saying, "do not tell lies so you do not have to remember as much")
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.