Ask Slashdot: Parental Content Control For Free OSs? 260
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:The best trick (Score:5, Informative)
No trick exists (Was:The best trick) (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Can you control the content they access when they are over at their friends place? "Many ways to access the web": yeah if you let them. Kids don't have a God given right to game consoles that are web connected, or cellphones, or tablets or ... IMO parents often supply all the above because they are a) in capable of saying no to their kids and/or the "great deal" being offered for a family plan, b) similar to a) don't want their kids to do anything they don't want to so boring them by making them sit on the
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Even as an adult I sometimes get porn when I was looking for something else. That's just the nature of the internet. I'd suggest:
- When they are very young simply whitelist sites you want them to go to at the DNS level. Set up a router with wifi that blocks everything else. Don't give them access to things like social media in particular, and besides which Facebook etc. usually require you to be at least 13 to sign up.
- When they get older and start actually looking for porn keep internet connected devices
Re:The best trick (Score:5, Insightful)
EdSame approach as for the rest of life (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a cinch that the childless dipshits giving parenting advice don't think twice about advising other people about things they have no first-hand knowledge of. Dunning-Kruger is real.
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Re:The best trick (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah.. it has nothing to do with them being cowardous. There are a sect of people that think kids should be exposed to sex and be permiscuous for whatever reason. Its probably so they can maintain a hope of getting laid at some point in their lives. This is more obvious when the discusson turns to the legal age of concent or abstinance but the m.o. is typically the same- hurl insults and slander until the person is afraid to ask the question openly anymore which reduces their ability to find answers.
In real life, parents should not be hovering over their kids 24/7. In order for that to be possible, they should be able to expect that junior can sit at the computer and look up something for school and not get links to goatz or tubgirl or whatever (2 girls one cup) because some troll thought it would be funny to link it under watching a cat dance or something stupid that children would easily get distracted by. They should be confident that when sally is looking up how to make beaded jewlery for frendship bracelets, she does not end up finding anal beads in action. And no parrent wants to be the one helping them while hovering and have it happen.
The alternative to censoring your kids connection is to censor everyones which is the wrong approach. Kids need a certain amount of freedom else they will not learn to make decision that have consequenses. Parents should be able to gain the tools to allow this to happen without over exposure jihad jerry and his death to america rambling.
Re:The best trick (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also a group of people (apparently a very small minority) that believe that sex isn't automatically evil, and it is the prohibitions that lead to deviancy and perversion and many of the other evils that plague us.
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I wish I had mod points to upvote you. This whole discussion is so US centric with Puritan morals :(
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I wouldn't say it's prohibition or puritanism that leads to deviancy, except in the sense that religion leads to heresy; you can't be deviant without having something to deviate *from*. Most fetishes are completely harmless, at least in the sense of damage to society; why stigmatize somebody just for being different? That's almost as bad as the puritanism itself, I'd say. Perhaps you mean "deviancy" in some other, more "evil" way (that is still not redundant with "perversion"), but in that case you should w
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That is absolute nonsense. I have never had Google nor Bing bring up porn when I was searching for terms that didn't involve pornography. This whole concept of "drive by porning" is nothing more than fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the "think of the children" namby-pambies who want to block adult sites from anyone accessing them on the internet.
If y
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This whole concept of "drive by porning" is nothing more than fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the "think of the children" namby-pambies who want to block adult sites from anyone accessing them on the internet.
Really? I guess some people are too young to remember WhiteHouse.com.
Stranded somewhere because B+ (Score:2)
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?
Time zones (Score:2)
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.
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and the children have unlimited time to get around it.
Someone really needs to define "children". This conversation is an absolute mess without defining the terms we're using (include a description of the various levels of "bad" content as well).
you have already "lost" already and I don't get it how it's really different than 20 years ago. I mean, was goatse so different 20 years ago or what the fuck? bbs's were full of xxx pics and texts too, raunchier than what you would read in hustler.
I was around and of prime age when BBS's were popular, and I had two computers, but we didn't have a modem, and I didn't see anyone that had one. This has little to fuckall to do with this conversation :-)
How was it different back then? In that, there IS a huge difference. The entry age to someone getting access to thes
Re:The best trick (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah that worked right up to the time everything went mobile. Still just about works for high end gaming but that's it.
Nothing is plugged in now, kids or devices, unless it's charging. All is wireless and portable and trivial to hide what you are doing even for feet away. Todays kids come home with tablets provided by the school which need to connect to the net to do their homework. Yes, really, they do.
People need to understand that todays kids have grown up with this stuff, they are intuitively familiar with it in the way we never will be - I was writing games in assembly language at age 12, but when I need to know how to do something on a phone I ask my kids, its quicker than Google. We will never out control or outsmart our kids on tech, best we can do is pass on our experience so they are prepared, and they'll still catch us out.
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In all probability, the best solution is to let them watch it real young, then they will say "Eeew - naked people, yukkk!" and never watch again.
Second best solution is to join the Amish. At least you will get a nice quilt!
Practically anything they can see on the internet has got to be better than the stuff on Cartoon Network in every possible way (probably including snuff movies).
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Second best solution is to join the Amish. At least you will get a nice quilt!
When I was a teen, I met and befriended some amish teens at a farmers' market near where I lived. Their parents allowed them to talk with us "English kids". They had other non-amish friends, too. Their village had phones - strictly for business and emergency use, but they were familiar with phones. Also calculators - which they were only allowed to use when helping at the farmers' market. I'm sure, these days, Amish kids are familiar with the internet despite whatever restrictions they live under.
(BTW, the
Ask the authority (Score:3)
Re:The best trick (Score:5, Interesting)
Apart from the tone of your message, I agree only partially on the content.
I agree that the technology is not the solution.
But supervision, as you say, is also not a complete solution.
In my experience (father of a now adult daughter), the best was to explain, discuss and educate my daughter. When my daughter was around 6/7 years old, I slowly showed her to lookup stuff on the internet, where there are interesting things and als explained her about "dangerous" and "inappropriate" content there could be.
But what was mot important was trust - i.e. I explained her that I trust her fully not to misuse the freedom I was giving her, when, at around age of 8, I allowed her to access the internet on her own. I explained her, later, about the dangers of posting inappropriate content on the internet e.g. on Facebook, or other social networks and what consequences it might have for her now or in the future.
But I always made clear that the decision would be hers, that I would always be there for her if she found something discomforting or felt that she did something discomforting and that I would help her as much as I can. I made clear, though, that there certain things where even I can't help (full disclaimer, I have strong IT/Software/Internet background) - and that the best would be that should be careful.
When she started using Social Networks, she then friended me (not me her) asking whether I could let her know if she posts something that could have negative effect on her or her future.
This was the same approach with my nephew (he is 16 now) about 4 years ago and this is the same approach with my god-son: trust, education, and help - less so "control" or "supervision" - and the funny thing in the end was that all three of them asked for some supervision when they started using social networks, etc.
Lastly: I showed all of them where they can find really interesting content that could be fun as well as where they can learn things - but this required to first understand what they really liked and were interested in (Daughter: Science, Knitting; Nephew: Singing, Police-Work; God-Son: Minecraft, Minecraft-Mods, Software-development, Games-Dev).
Hope this helps from a father, uncle, godfather
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First actually helpful post!
As a parent of a 5 year old who currently has no unsupervised web access, I'm painfully aware that this will not last. He can currently access curated content from the internet in some games without my supervision. He will need web access in the not too distant future. Trust, showing them how to be safe, and how to find things that actually interest them, is clearly the way forward.
(As an aside to those who think parenting equals full time supervision... I don't think any of
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As an added note: just to protect them (all three of them) from malicious code (read: virus, etc), I kindly asked that any time they want to install an app, they should please let me first check whether the app in question is "safe".
They all either have/had laptops or desktops: so this was a no-brainer. Also, since they all use Macs, I can actually limit installations to "AppStore". So, normally, if they find something in the Apple AppStore (OS X), they ask me to check if it's ok or if there are any known i
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Sounds like the right advice for most kids. Doesn't sound like it would protect against scammers. ... Possibly a refillable credit card? That could let them learn with limited repercussions.
OTOH, some children are "less able". I don't know how one can protect them. I have an autistic neice, and while I don't approve of the way she is being raised, I have to admit that I wouldn't know how to deal with the situation. (But Pavlov proved that the way being used is wrong. You don't positively reinforce tem
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Teachers use the internet to shut up the troublemakers by letting them play flash games in class. There have been some conflicts in the school I work at over it - IT blocks a website while a student is playing a game, the student kicks up a big fuss, the teacher complains that IT are intruding upon classroom management.
From the teachers' perspective, they aren't getting that one student to do their work anyway - so it's better to keep them quietly wasting their own time than clowning around and distracting
Not the right way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the right way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the right way (Score:4, Insightful)
Software protection is just a crutch, the real protection is education and vigilance.
Hmm, well, I do both.
Educate on the one hand, but on the other hand I'm also more devoted to maintaining a healthy home than I am to faux sophistication. Family computer right in the living room. Parental controls on the tablet. No smartphones for the kids.
Ooh, oh no, how awful I am. Their lives will be so impoverished if they have to wait a few more years to experience worthless crap.
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Family computer right in the living room.
Does it run Rockman? Or Akumajou Dracula?
But seriously, good job on putting a PC in the living room. This means your family won't have to spend extra on a game console, as kids can just run HDMI from the PC to the TV when they want to play a game together.
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> Parental controls on the tablet.
Care to explain? This is what the author of TFA is asking advice on.
Kindle Fire - most recent version, I think - has a good set of parental controls.
My wife set it up, so I don't have the terminology and specifics at hand. I can say that it works really well though. I was skeptical, but I'm impressed.
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Yes, my son has an Android tablet, and we use the restricted account for him. He can't install software, pay for things in apps, or access youtube or a web browser. It's safe for him to play the games I've set up for him - many of which require internet access. And he can't run up a huge bill accidentally.
Before Restricted accounts existed, I used a thing called Kids Mode for a while. This also worked quite well, but the interface was much less usable than vanilla Android.
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If you think talking to children is sufficient, then you are a classic example of why it's not.
That doesn't even work with most adults.
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If you think talking to children is sufficient, then you are a classic example of why it's not.
That doesn't even work with most adults.
Yes, but at the same time a resounding no!
Whether "talking to children/adults/whoever" works is dependent on a range of things:
1) Are you approaching it from a positive mindset? If you talk to people expecting them to ignore what you say, you are far more likely to find them ignoring you.
2) Are you "preaching", or trying to be informative? If the former, what you tell people will often be heard with a degree of skepticism and subsequently disregarded.
3) Have you always taken the "talking" approach, or have
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Having the friends over is an opportunity. I walked in on a bunch of teenage boys using chat roulette for a "laugh". As a group it probably was harmless, had they done this alone they could possibly got in to real trouble. I told them that girl could easily be a 60 year old fat man, it could also be a really young girl, either way it could get you in trouble and not what you are looking for. They were genuinely repulsed and I'm pretty sure they got the idea..
Do any of their friends use internet filtering
Network layer and education (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Network layer and education (Score:3)
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Do what I did: set up filtering at the gateway and give plenty of time to both discussion and management.
I used a transparent squid proxy with access control lists appropriate for the kid and intercepted and redirected DNS queries. (With more than one kid, I needed multiple acls, ymmv.)
Initially I limited internet access to specific times and a whitelist and discussed what they were doing daily. Over time and with age and maturity, I relaxed the acl to just record what was being accessed and just reviewed
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Pretty much what I did. Block the kids' MAC
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>
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.
I liked the taste and (ultimately) became a brewer.
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Good point and I am otherwise inclined to agree with you except for one thing: kid's tastebuds and their general sense of taste is nothing like ours. By the time you are an adult, a good percentage of of the sense of taste you had when you were growing up is already lost. This is why infants do best on extremely bland blended peas and such. The GP makes a strong argument from experience.
Speaking for myself, my mother smoked until I was 7 years of age. When I was about 5, I distinctly remember pestering her
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My parents could have blocked porn all day long and it wouldn't have affected my interest in the slightest. Naked girls doing naughty things? Yes please.
IMO by the time kids are old enough to care they are old enough to jerk off. Please get rid of the belt-buckle hats and let Puritans live on only on our cereal boxes.
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I also hate alcohol too when my parents let me tried wines, beers, etc. Same with friends. I will take water and juice!
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No. It is usually referred to as "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and criminal prosecution awaits for whomever supplied the alcohol.
Re: Network layer and education (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect, in most states you are allowed to provide alcohol to your own minors (though many restrict it to private property only).
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It is true that not everybodynis a good parent. Or at least not as good as some think they need to be. But are those poorly skilled parents really the ones seeking this type of advicr and if they are, wouldn't it something like the crutch that helps someone walk? I mean couldn't aid in them becoming a good parent?
Not going to work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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What's game theory got to do with this?
Dansguardian (Score:2)
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I came here to mention exactly this. Getting the initial blocklist was somewhat of a challenge, the connection kept timing out.
My purpose was not for children so much as restricting the free wifi I provided to guests and neighbors. To "encourage" the use of the dansguardian proxy I used a wireless router that did not have a connection to the internet, and the dansguardian box was a client on both that network and the real network. Worked well enough.
Watch over the shoulder - only way to be sure (Score:3)
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Your wireless device can't access the Internet if you don't know the WPA2 key, your parents are unwilling to pay for a cellular data plan for your device, and you're too young to lawfully work for the money to pay for your own cellular data plan.
I'd just like to take this opportunity. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Would these be some of the same Third World kids who learn that condoms cause AIDS, that sex with a virgin cures it, and that they're morally bound to kill their sister if they suspect that she's not a virgin?
It's waste of effort (Score:2)
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Does not work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Yeah, 'cause no adults ever fall for internet scams. Ever.
I mean, good grief -- we can't expect adults to avoid scammers, so you think simple education is going to be effective for kids with much less real-world experience?
And as for "bullies," well this is part of a larger concern that impersonal interactions on the internet can easily become very personal, particularly to impressionable young people. This isn't just bullying -- it's things like sexual predators "grooming" kids and convincing them to
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You seem to have a personality disorder form the delusional and paranoid spectrum. Better get help before you ruin other people's (like your children's) lives. Nothing what you said is reasonable in the real world.
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I saw plenty of porn, and I'm perfectly fine. I'm nearly thirty, and still haven't had sex.
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There are actually no "methods for doing this". The only thing you can do is explain to them that porn is not real. Anybody halfway smart does discover that on their first actual sexual contact anyways. In addition, I do not buy it. There are now very strong indicators that neither violence on TV nor in games cause people to be more violent. I see zero reason that this should change when sex is put into the mix. I rather thing that this is again prohibitionist propaganda, that cannot hold water when examine
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I doubt that this "porn addiction" exists. Sure, therapists, politicians and other are making great profit claiming it exists, but to me this seems to be the tired old "moral" rules of various religions that make this claim, because it furthers their goals of portraying porn as "bad".
In addition the whole concept of "addiction" is badly skewed in US public opinion. Might be a result of the "War on Drugs", which has been used to scare the population since 1920, and which has had zero positive effects, but an
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The APA don't recognise porn addition as a condition itsself, and they are as close to an authority as you're going to get. They may classify it as an impulse control disorder - akin to compulsive gambling or kleptomania. This is an area still prone to revision, as reliable research on the subject is still lacking.
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Sampling bias, much?
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The great joke to me is that if you want to resist the temptation of porn, then masturbation is probably the most powerful weapon you could bring to bear.
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For healthy males, no sex (whether with others or all by themselves) is dangerous. It leads to mental instability, delusions and loss of impulse control. This is one reason why in that situation the body engages an emergency program usually called "wet dream". This is a poor substitute.
I can only conclude that these people have some severe personality disorder that lets them not recognize a natural body function for what it is. This is about as stupid as not going to the bathroom and the results are about a
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Porn likely isn't the problem even if addicted. Its kids learning that its ok to tie a woman up and shove things into places they do not normally see. Its in little sally seeing that its normal for school girls to have sex with old men when before anyone notices she is at the age someone should be having the talk with her.
Its about exposure, often by mistake (looking for sometjing else or followkng a link) before the parent or child is able to deal with it or even understand the situations.
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This. The problem with porn is that it presents an extremely skewed view of sex, which can seriously interfere with a normal, healthy sex life. Most people don't look like porn stars, and many -- especially women -- have no interest in doing many of the acts commonly portrayed. Anal sex, for example, is a porn staple but something relatively few women have any interest in. Porn also presents sex as a casual and purely physical thing for the most part, which leads people -- especially but not exclusively you
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You seem to have a (church-sponsored?) delusion of what is "normal". Hint: It is not what _you_ think is normal. There is also the little problem that you think that consenting adults should not do things you do not perceive as "normal". The term "healthy" you use is just a lie.
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So you think people should only have sex in the way you perceive as the right one? Quite a few adults would disagree with that.
Send them to boarding school... (Score:2)
...in Tehran or Pyongyang.
I mean it's the only way to guarantee your kids won't be accessing undesirable material, right?
Transparent Proxy (Score:2)
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.
Avoiding Frustation (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.opendns.com/home-i... [opendns.com]
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!
If they're old enough to surf on their own ... (Score:3)
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 [imdb.com] 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 [amazon.de] 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.
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For an ACTUAL solution... (Score:3)
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.
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Parental control? (Score:2)
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Child Rearing 101 (Score:2)
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.
TL;DR: Submitter is unable to use google (Score:2)
first hit: http://www.linuxlinks.com/arti... [linuxlinks.com]
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Slight tangential comment on smartphones (Score:2)
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.
Re:idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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
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when they do, they deserve real net access.
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