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Ask Slashdot: Parental Content Control For Free OSs?
m.alessandrini writes Children grow up, and inevitably they will start using internet and social networks, both for educational and recreational purposes. And it won't take long to them to learn to be autonomous, especially with all the smartphones and tablets around and your limited time. Unlike the years of my youth, when internet started to enter our lives gradually, now I'm afraid of the amount of inappropriate contents a child can be exposed to unprepared: porn, scammers, cyberbullies or worse, are just a click away.
For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites. What about GNU/Linux? Or Android? Several solutions rely on setting up a proxy with a whitelist of sites, or similar, but I'm afraid this approach can make internet unusable, or otherwise be easy to bypass. Have you any experiences or suggestions? Do you think software solutions are only a part of the solution, provided children can learn hacking tricks better than us, and if so, what other 'human' techniques are most effective?
For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites. What about GNU/Linux? Or Android? Several solutions rely on setting up a proxy with a whitelist of sites, or similar, but I'm afraid this approach can make internet unusable, or otherwise be easy to bypass. Have you any experiences or suggestions? Do you think software solutions are only a part of the solution, provided children can learn hacking tricks better than us, and if so, what other 'human' techniques are most effective?
The best trick is for parents to actually supervise their children.
I hate all you lazy buggers who just "plug the kids in" and leave them for hours a day unsupervised. Do your damned job as parents!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The right way is to talk to your kids about these things. Give examples of scams, tell them there is porn, there is violence, and always, always if they feel unsure about something they should talk to you (Mostly for scams, I'm pretty sure they'll handle porn. Hell, even weird porn isn't as bad as seeing ISIS chop someones head off). Software protection is just a crutch, the real protection is education and vigilance.The right way is to talk to your kids about these things. Give examples of scams, tell them there is porn, there is violence, and always, always if they feel unsure about something they should talk to you (Mostly for scams, I'm pretty sure they'll handle porn. Hell, even weird porn isn't as bad as seeing ISIS chop someones head off). Software protection is just a crutch, the real protection is education and vigilance.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If you're going to implement any kind of technical filtering it needs to be done at the network layer, and not on the physical machine that the kids have access to. If you do it on the physical machine then they will inevitably find a way around it, even as simple as booting a livecd.
Ofcourse the key is education, this content is out there and kids will inevitably get access to it sooner or later. Whatever controls you implement on your own network or devices, the kids will either find a way to bypass them, or have access to an unfiltered network/device somewhere else. And if something is blocked, it becomes more interesting to the kids and they will actively seek out ways to get at the blocked content, whereas if it was unblocked the kids may not even have any interest in it...
A good example is alcohol, when i was in school many of the other kids in my class were forbidden from touching alcohol and that made them seek out ways to obtain alcohol... Myself and a few others were never forbidden, our parents allowed us to try alcohol if we wanted... I found alcoholic drinks tasted quite disgusting, and lost interest in them.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
By definition. And if you think about it, you'll notice why.
The "enemies" in this battle is you vs. your child. Your goal: To keep your kid from seeing stuff it's not supposed to see. Your kid's goal: To do whatever it wants and to ignore that rule you imposed.
You have finite means and finite time at your hands to implement something supposed to be blocking your child. Your child has WAY more amount of time at his or her hands (think about when they come home from school vs. when you come from work). They also have a pool of peers to draw information from, and in this pool the ability to bypass parental control is quite a bit of a status symbol, while you relying on your peers is probably not that useful since asking for help because your kids outsmart you is much but certainly NOT a status symbol.
If everything else fails, if you are really the ultimate computer guru who can lock down your kids' computers and smartphones, all they have to do is spend the day with li'l Timmy from across the street whose parents don't know jack about computers, and who can't keep Timmy (and in turn your kids) from seeing whatever they please. Which is, again, something Timmy will certainly and gladly agree to, since as stated above, outsmarting your parents and ignoring their rules is a status symbol.
In other words, the deck is stacked against you. The sensibly move is not to play.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hi. If you're reasonably technically able the Sophos UTM has a great web filtering system and is free for home use. This can protect your whole network as well.
Dansguardian works well on the network level and is easy to set up and configure the degree of filtering.
The other things are little more than placebos. If the kid can get to a search engine it's not going to slow them down much. A solution advocated for years has been to put the computer in a public space until you no longer care what the child looks at.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank my father, and my friends' dads who left their porno stashes in obvious places and didn't ever bitch about it unless we took too many and didn't bring them back.
Thanks to all the cool dads out there who realized that even though we weren't 3rd world children, we should get to checkout some nudity as part of our natural adolescence -- I mean, why else would we have the interest to do so?
Also, thanks to the local BBSs which had far shittier porn, but digitized versions of The Anarchist's Cook Book, Steal This Book, and Phreaking / Hacking guides, the latter of which my parents surely would not have approved of, but without which I wouldn't have a leg-up in the lucrative career I occupy today.
In short: Fuck off parents. 3rd world kids help do the work of carrying water, collecting firewood, and butchering animals for meals at young ages while seeing nudity constantly -- Why would you want your kids to have LESS knowledge about life and less skills than children of 3rd world nations? Admit it: You don't know what's good for your kids. It's a damn good think you can't keep them from seeing anything they want online.
The key here is probably limit exposure, it cannot be fully prevented no matter what you do if they want to.
The oldest trick in the book is to only allow the youngest kids to access the Internet from a machine that is in public sight, in living room, kitchen etc. In that way, they can only watch the naughty stuff when they are alone at home, and for young kids its not very often. As they grow older, they get more alone time alone and at some point their own personal computer they can use to watch naughty pictures in privacy.
Unless you want to extend the control up until they move out, then it's complicated...
The Internet will detect any parental control as a damage and route around it.
The "solutions" on other platforms do not work, unless your children are really stupid. The only thing they do is make forbidden things a bit more interesting. One reason such systems do AFAIK not exist on Linux is that the futility of their use is rather obvious and the scam of getting money from parents for this is not attempted there.
On the other side, the dangers to kids on the Internet are vastly overblown. For example, there still is not one shred of evidence that porn is actually dangerous to children. The only reason children are "protected" from it (which does not work and has never worked) is that various religions want this. The risk of "scammers" and "cyberbullies" are easily mitigated by explaining to children how these things work. Of course a few will still fall for it, but scammers are no real risk as children have limited funds, and everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullies anyways. And what you put under "worse" is basically your imagination running wildly, not any actual problems. Just make sure your children trust you and come to you for advice if they have a problem. Using such tools may have a negative effect there, as mistrust breeds mistrust.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is probably only one way to prevent any serious harm .. Build trust .. a lot of trust .. so that the next time the children get tempted with something and feel it could be risky , they'll call you or ask you .. without fear of being ridiculed , grounded and the etc.
Nice slogan. But utter nonsense if you think about it for a micromoment.
Are they intended to limit the root user's ability to limit what regular users can do?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And , sooner or later they'll figure out how to change the DNS settings at the browser end.
Agreed. And no matter what he does his children will still have that access. He does't own every computer system in the world. His children will simply use other systems rather than their own, when they want to go outside the limitation system he implements.
This isn't anything new just because you throw the intertubes into the mix. It is the same problem parents have always had. How can I control my children at all times, given that there is no frigging way in hell I can ever have that kind of control?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
stop trying to use technical measures to avoid parenting.
Right, because it's impossible to do both. Technical measures should never be used as part of a comprehensive plan to accomplish anything.
...in Tehran or Pyongyang.
I mean it's the only way to guarantee your kids won't be accessing undesirable material, right?
You can set up a transparent proxy like squid (http://www.squid-cache.org/) combined with iptables (http://iptables.org/), so that any outbound port 80 or port 443 requests from the machine can get filtered via squid.
Then, in squid you can run all your logic through DansGuardian (http://dansguardian.org/?page=whatisdg), a content filter.
Hammer Software http://hammersoftware.ca/ Good service, Creative solutions - Hamilton, ON
You can go simple and just avoid frustration by using OpenDNS:
https://www.opendns.com/home-i...
They have a feature to block inappropriate websites, and I think you cannot change the DNS unless you have the sudo/root password.
Also, Adblock Plus blocks malware and social media (if your kids are too young to use Facebook).
Finally, YouTube has an option to block sensitive media, under account options.
Good luck!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Prepare for a ton of people that project themselves into the situation as the kid and don't want any restrictions at all, instead of as the parent.
If they're old enough to surf on their own, they're old enough to handle it on their own.
It is - to a degree - your call if they are old enough to do so, but countermeasures to keep the "bad internet" away from your children, if you are geek enough to allow them access, is a bit of an oxymoron.
Hint: If they want to see porn and/or Isis set someone on fire, they will do so. If not at home then at/with their friends. Trying to prevent this is being silly. Once I trusted my daughter to handle her own Ubuntu Netbook I also trusted her to handle the web. ... I did curb her webtime though, it can get out of hand. ... But she uses the web and her smartphone as an extension for her social life, not as a substitute. She's actually more on the go than I am, and unwinds not surfing but streaming american teenie serials to improve her english (currenty the 100 is hip). Not the worst thing to do, imho. Her homework gets done and she's due for her a-levels, so who am I to complain?
I had a discussion a few years back with a mom of one of her very close friends. She too was worried that the new laptop would enable them to watch porn and get a false impression about sexuality. I basically said the same thing that I wrote above and bit my lip about her habit of changing boyfriends every odd month - something way more likely of determining her daughters POV on relationships and sexuality.
Ask them to learn something productive with them - my daughter eventually decided to do a little image editing and I got her a neat colorful book on Gimp of which she duefully did some excersises and learned a little about files, photography and image manipulation. Good thing for a teenage girl exposed to a cosmetics/fashion industry in constant overdrive. She didn't want to learn programming though. ... I'll survive that I guess.
Tell them about Facebook, Whatsapp, data mining, automated 24/7 surveilance, scams, rapists, shady friends, online mobbing (both sides of it!), etc.. Give them fake accounts and tell them to never use their real name and adress and to be suspicious of the web in general - including mainstream news.
Bottom line: ... That's parenting 101 for you.
Be a good father, take care of your kids and make a reasonable judgement as to when they're ready to have their own computer.
Do the basics to keep them out of harms way (hint: porn is way, way down on that list) and make sure they've understood what you're talking about and have no fear of coming to you whenever they're insecure about something internet related. Let the rest take its course.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't understand what all the brouhaha is about. The best authority in this case are your children. If there is a way to lock someone out of Internet access they will stumble on it or figure it out. Ask for their help. You may lose your internet access, but at least your children will be safe.
Supervision and education aside,
Try "Untangle" on a firewall box between them and the internet. Then it doesn't matter what OS they're using, or if they're using an iPad, iPod, or other device to access the internet either.
Untangle is free (at least the lite version, which is actually more than enough for home use), and will run on an old or cheap box. I have mine running on a book-sized PC I built for under $200, including an SSD HD. It's a Linux-based firewall/NAT/more.
It'll filter ads (common malware sources), malware, phishing attacks, intrusions, website filtering (whitelist or blacklist) by content type, block certain protocols (TOR, etc.). Basically, you can lock it down tight. My kids are still too young to intentionally get into much trouble yet, but it protects them from the inadvertent trouble. But - it was enough to totally frustrate my teenage nephews over Christmas - and the logs show they weren't able to get around it (which was a good test!).
www.untangle.com
Check it out.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I'm under the opinion that philopophy is dead and most Education sucks; If we keep wrapping our children in blankets we're only going keep them immature which is leading to the rotting of philosophy and knowledege. I know what I'm saying is politically incorrect but If children don't find out for 'em selves how are they going to do if certain situations on the internet arise in real life.
I'd say ditch the idea of 'innocence' a virtue spouted by religion and start getting kids educated otherwise bigger shit in the such as war is only going to worse in later years as later generations will want war as they won't even know the true horrors of war and they will just that war is soultion to everything and they probably wn't event question the hroseshit lies of politicans .
I was 15 when I saw the guantanamo torture vids along with collateral murder ; I'm glad I did, I'm 20 now and because of experience watching those videos I understand that war sought only be used in serious situations; I fully understand the hypocrisy of our leaders and the lies that were fed to us at school. If my parents had blocked my access I'd probably been just been just as oblivious as everyone to the true surveillance state of which we live in.
Little Brains cannot be held as innocent forever; as shown here which points out that the age matuirity is increasing because again little minds haven't been exposed to the enough reality. Students today are more like children than adults and need protection.
Not really
When i lock down a network via DNS, i also block the dns port at the router andbusually eiyher require a connection to a proxy or on site DNS for any traffic that leaves the network.
Now when i do it, its generally a small business concerned about data theft and has had issues with trojans or some malware in the past. All this can be done with cheap linux server as the router/gateway or even with most of the open source ots router fitmware replacements. I have not had to set ul wifi with one of the oss firmwares jn years but i found it easier to just connect an accesd point as a bridge after the rrvice rather than using the drbice wifi. Maybe things have changed since them though. But simply changing the DNS of the browser would get you an error page.
In another note, i relly on little more than the safe search filters in the search engines for my kids. I'll deal withnit if they start looking for inappropriate content when ut happens. Just don't want it offered to them when searching for their favorite singer or something for school. There are for instance several ways you can fat finger tribalism in a search box and get some very wonderfull results. (Tribadism)
This is same reason we use prepaid phones. They have a budget and can use it how they wish. The budget changes with their grades. More A's the faster it refills and their budget goes up.
Is it just A's? Will a report card full of B+s put one of the kids at risk of being stranded somewhere with no way to call home?
Thank you, I was looking for people who actually went through it.
Thanks, I was looking for people who actually went through it. Education and conversations are of course the first thing, and it hurts that many commenters decided I wanted to replace them with technology.
Anyway I don't know why a parent should not be a good parent if he looks for extra means of protecting his children, other than what you can do every day.
What is being asked for is not a form of protection but a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Indeed we've known it is bad for so long that we actually have a fairytale we read to our children which cautions against it. Remember the tale of sleeping beauty who was to prick her finger on a spinning wheel before falling asleep and so the king banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Since it was impossible to completely enforce the blockade the result was that when she saw a spinning wheel she was so curious abut it she ended pricking her finger.
The same applies to the internet: you cannot block everything. Instead you can just use the same approach that you use for everything else in life: set out the rules, supervise them so you have a reasonable chance of noticing any serious violations (if your kids are human there will be violations and you will not catch all of them), make sure there are consequences for those serious violations you do catch and finally teach them how to deal with any inappropriate content which they do manage to see.
Nobody suggests that we should combine HHGTTG and Google Glass to make glasses for kids that will turn black and the first sign of anything deemed inappropriate occurring in real life. Indeed we set up rules for our kids to help avoid such situations and we make sure that our kids know how to handle such situations if they do occur (e.g. say no to strangers, don't do drugs etc.). So why don't we take the same approach to parenting with the internet?
It's called a whitelisting firewall.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Correct. In the usual dose of nanny-state irony, the knee-jerk demands for legislated zero-tolerance reactions to minor issues is far more damaging to the development of society than just leaving things alone.
The idiotic "think of the children" people are actually the ones harming the children. It's just that it happens over time, instead of immediately, so they're incapable of processing that. Just like government and companies who can't think long term anymore. It's like some kind of disease where the victim can't think anything but short-term.
I'd rather just discuss these things with my kids. Way easier to give them the tools to make the right decisions on their own than to hide my kids under a rock, deep in a cave.
None of those hosts file block adult content you want to keep from children.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This includes the hours that they are on-line (had one getting at 2am to 4am to talk with freinds).
Friends in what country? 2 AM to 4 AM in your time zone might correspond to the time between completing homework and shutting down for the night in another time zone. For example, what's 2 AM to 4 AM in Amsterdam might be 7 PM to 9 PM in Chicago.
when they do, they deserve real net access.
first hit: http://www.linuxlinks.com/arti...
Well, there are a few that really make the effort, by keeping the children in cages or small locked rooms.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
For me one of the most effective things was to let them know that was monitoring what sites they were visiting. When you first let them online you need to supervise them closely and explain what they should avoid and why. Once they understand what is expected/allowed then give then free access but let then know you are monitoring what sites they are visiting. Knowing that they will self censor.
From a technical point of view I put their machines on a separate subnet with a transparent proxy to monitor access and cron jobs/iptables to block any access when it was time for them to be sleeping.
It is also worth remembering they don't magically change from children to adults on a particular birthday, as they mature yet then know they are allow a wider range of access. For example as young children I did not allow them to play violent games but as preteens I allowed moderately violent games and as teens I didn't really limit games because they had demonstrated they had maturity separate to rules of real life from games. Likewise trying to stop teen boys from view porn is a waste of time, best to let them know that what they see on the Internet should generally not be consider real in terms dealing with the opposite sex.
My two daughters both had their own computers by the time they were about 10 or 12. They had them in their bedrooms. Other parents we talked to were completely freaked out. "Oh my God, we would never let Tiffany have a computer in her bedroom." Does Tiffany have a smartphone? Well of course. Where does she keep it? In her bedroom. WTF?? It just didn't occur to them that all the reasons they had for not letting their kids have a computer in their bedrooms were equally applicable to smartphones.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
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* They are TRULY one of, if not THE, best sites I use from the security community for populating my custom hosts file here...
APK
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1. Don't lie to your kids.
2. Tell them the rule: they do something they shouldn't like access an adult site, their internet access is canned. Right there. Period.
3. Install a keylogger on a limited account for them. Now abiding rule #1, you can tell them that you will know what websites they've been on and if anything you don't like them being on comes up, refer to rule #2.
4. SUPERVISE THEM. The younger they are the more supervision they're gonna need. Be aware of terms of service on websites such as Facebook (under 13s not allowed) and make sure THEY are aware as well. If your kid is under 13, they do not get a fucking facebook account.
5. Don't let them play freemium games on the internet. There are MANY games about on compilation CDs that are so similar they're indistinguishable (and arguably better quality) than Facebook Freemiums, such as Chuzzle as being a perfectly good alternative for Candy Crush. I have Chuzzle on a games collection DVD. Not that I play it, it is pretty interesting looking if you're into click/drool gaming. I'm not. But it keeps the rugrats away from your credit cards.
6. The Internet is a TOOL to be USED, not an alternative reality to disappear in to.
Speaking of which, I really must go to bed. Night, all. Fucking 4am, the hell am I still doing up?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
1. Communicate with your children. Let them know what is acceptable surfing and what is not. Teach them about the good and the bad of the Internet and how to recognize it. Be specific and thorough.
2. Use the Internet router to control their devices access. You should be able to write rules to limit them by the device.
3. Use controls on the pcs and mobile devices. For example on the PC you could use Timekpr.
4. You can log their activity.
What level of monitoring you use depends on many factors. Factors include, but are not limited to: your ability to trust your children, the trustability of your children to follow your rules, your level of paranoia.
Note on item #1. Communication is an ongoing two way street. This means you can't just sit down once with them and unleash them on the world. It means being a parent and actually being involved.
Be prepared for your children to eventually be able to break every control you implement.
Only you know can know what level of monitoring is right, and which is too little and which is too Big Brother.
Eventually they'll be able to figure out how to hack into your PCs or devices and bypass every measure you institute. At which point you should hire them to work for you.
If "parental content control" means your kids do not learn about sex, I'm opposed to it. In countries where people are ridiculously puritan (i.e., the US) the number of teen pregnancies is 20 times higher than in countries where people are relaxed about sex and nudity (i.e., the Netherlands). I have always supervised my kids, online and offline, but never installed "parental content control".
no, I don't have a sig
you can try privoxy as a proxy with tight control (whitelist/backlist, regexp by words, url, etc), if needed as a transparent proxy, so one can not change that. you can later screen the logs to see if anything more needs to be filtered (recommended ublocker or ghostery to also block ads and tracking, to help keep the logs cleaner) :)
WoT (web of trust) firefox add-on as a generic blocker, as it block bad, dangerous or not child safe... is not perfect but no solution will completely filter all urls... having said that, if is very good, also protects adults
Chats and social network are the main dangers, so parental supervisions and teaching is always required
Make then understand that the internet stores and copies everythings, so they should keep private things private and that they should always questions how much they should trust people that they don't know in flesh and blood.
you kids need to trust you enough to tell you about the problems and things they found... if they really want to workaround any filter, they will do it...
i see friends kids using the dogs facebook login to hide things from parents, others connecting to the neighborhood network and many using the (unprotected) friends computer to do things that they can't do at home
Higuita
K9 on Android used to work for me until I updated to 4.4 KitKat. Now it just crashes on startup.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Protip: get your kids to socialize away from the internet. That will boost their lifetime achievement in jobs, school, everything much more then reading Wikipedia or watching documentaries. It's all about social skills. Kids should be writing and doing math more anyways. by hand. over and over again. If your kids are spending any extra time on the internet, it's a waste. The best thing is just logs that show how much time they wasted and discuss it with them, but remember they will just hate you for monitoring them
Not going to help the really determined. Dig allows you to pull DNS records from arbitrary servers with the @ option. You can add a plugin to a portable browswer with a change hosts plugin so you only have to look it up once. It may protect against a lot of casual or inadvertant exposure, but the old 100% is looking over the shoulder method
When I was a Linux dad with young kids getting access to the net, I spent some time worrying about this. When I grew up, you might score a copy of Penthouse, but today, you might find "Two Girls One Cup," or back then it was probably goatse. Nothing I ever encountered in Penthouse could compare to goatse. What would stuff like that even do to the mind of a child? Not to mention all the pedophile stalkers and lions and tigers and bears. I felt I had to try to protect them.
In the end, I found some stuff some guys said I could use to create a net nanny thing. It involved reading several PhD dissertations, a lot of programming, and at least three rubber chickens. It was all way over my head, and I never got anywhere with it. The kids ended up having totally unrestricted, unfettered, free reign of the whole big ocean of sleaze and pedophile stalkers and everything, pretty much from kindergarten on.
They turned out fine, and eventually thanked me for not trying to net nanny them. As my now 21 year old son said once, "Dad, I never wanted to watch donkeys fucking midgets anyway, and you never had anything to worry about."
Both of them have switched to Windows, incidentally.
Pretty certain the Ask Slashdot article wanted to block adult content first and foremost. Your provided hosts files do not offer those parental controls requested.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.