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Parental Controls 10

Submitted by Orange Crush
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. (Beyond: watch him constantly or just deal with it like the adult you intend to raise him to be.)

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? (she does sign my paychecks...)"
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  • Password protect the BIOS, and then put a lock on the physical case to keep it from being opened without a key. If they break into the computer to reset the bios, at least you will know about it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by huha (755976)
      Booting another OS for internet purposes proves to be trivially easy these days, even without access to the BIOS--virtual machines are fast enough to support linux for browsing. If microsoft.com is not blocked, downloading Virtual PC and setting it up to run damn small linux or any other live cd is no problem at all.

      The only way to prevent surfing to unwanted sites is dedicated hardware for whitelisting with an integrated modem to prevent simply disconnecting it from the network. But this is stupid, as it t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t (151149)
        Set the boot order to boot from C: first so they can't boot another OS.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by huha (755976)
          Virtual machines can be obtained easily and feature close to everything you'll need for web surfing.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t (151149)
            What does that have to do with what I said?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by huha (755976)
              Even if you can't boot a live cd by physically inserting it into the CD-ROM drive because the computer boots from C: first, you can run it using virtual machines for which software can be obtained through microsoft.com, a website that's almost always not blocked by filters, as it serves important updates and software for Windows.

              In other words:
              - Download MS virtual PC
              - Get a Linux live CD, either by downloading it from the internet or by getting it from a friend/magazine/school/whatever
              - Configure MS virtua

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by mark-t (151149)
                Which requires the computer to already be on, during which times he can presumably be supervised. The article already addresses the futility of trying to control unsupervised activity. The suggestion I offered was how to make sure he doesn't use the computer at all when supervision is impractical.

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by huha (755976)
                  Filtering/Monitoring is only sensible when you can't sit near the teen to look at the screen, i.e. for unsupervised surfing.
                  This can be (unbeknownst to an unsupecting computer novice) circumvented in very little time.

                  A MS Virtual PC system can be set up in very little time, even on another computer. As USB sticks get cheaper and cheaper these days, it's very easy to transfer a whole windows system in a Virtual PC container to a stick, alongside MS Virtual PC itself and plug the stick in before the computer

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by mark-t (151149)
                    As I said, the article already addressed the futility of controlling unsupervised activities.
  • Low tech works. Put the computer in an open, easily observed space. We have our son's computer in the same room as ours and can see everything he does.

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