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?"

Comments

Its her computer, and her right to as she wishes

[coulbc]

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.

The best solution is not to block them!

[Flyskippy1]

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