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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?"
So you have the Great Firewall of China in your house?
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.
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.
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.