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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.
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 "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.
I think its beneficial to set up parental controls, as bypassing it serves as a useful learning experience.
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.
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
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!
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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.
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)
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?