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.
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
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
Putting the computer in a public place really helps a lot. Knowing that they could be walked in on is a great deterrent. It's not 100% but, it does really limit what they can do. It wouldn't help if the child is home alone, however. If the child is home alone often enough that it is an issue, you have a much bigger family problem on your hands then the computer.
I've worked at multiple ISP's and it amazes me how surprised parent's are by this answer. They had never considered moving the physical computer an option before I mentioned it.
I agree with the consensus of the other Slashdot posts that no amount of software is going to solve the problem. If the computer is in their room and they have unlimited time to work on it, any software can and will be circumvented.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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.
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.
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?
>
>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?"
Make your kids watch you in a porno. They'll be put off porn for life...
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.)
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.
Umm, link please.... ?
I read Usenet for the articles.
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.)