How can I block a website with moderate effectiveness?

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=Joey P]
We have 2 computers that THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH (Mine and my fathers) and two that are for everyone else to do work on. Work consists of printing out order guides, writing invoices, making UPS labels, looking up addresses etc. But every few weeks I go though IE’s history and block everything I can see they’ve been using it for…NBA.com BLOCKED, myspace.com BLOCKED, ticketmaster.com BLOCKED stubhub.com BLOCKED etc etc etc. Normally I use 127.0.0.1 and it just comes up as a page not found error. Usually the person using the computer figures either the site is down or the internet is screwy. They ask me for help, and Gee, I don’t know what the deal is, strange :smiley: . Anyways, just to throw a little spice in, instead of 127.0.0.1 I’ll change some of them to www.yahoo.com. So you open IE, it goes to yahoo (the homepage), they type in ticketmaster.com and it appears to start loading and yahoo comes back up…hilarity ensues (for me). Sometimes I’ll use yahoo.com, sometimes I’ll just point it to someother random website. Confuses the hell out of them it does.
[/QUOTE]

I thought about doing that, but I left it alone. Maybe later, I’ll set it up so that every time she types MySpace it goes to her school website where her homework is. That would be really funny. Maybe she would take it as a sign from God that she should be doing her homework. Or, she would assume that God is as dumb as the rest of us and really out to keep her from being happy. After all, we’re the ones with the problem – she’s perfectly fine. Ever had a teenager?

[QUOTE=drachillix]
This can be like trying to herd cats as most IM software is “port agile” and will select from a list of alternate ports if existing ports are blocked. about the only way to lock down IM software is via a firewall that specifies the application blocked regardless of port.
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All I’ve done is given her a limited user account that prevents her from installing software. So, the IM software isn’t even available to her. So far, that seems to have held her at bay.

[QUOTE=sunspace]
Not to mess with it if it works, but can’t you just use the second-level .myspace.com domain?
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MySpace uses tons of names like “members”, “blog”, “vids” and so on where the “www” should go. I tried using a wildcard in the hosts file (“*.myspace.com”), but that didn’t work.

She does not have a mobile phone any more. That, too, was a temptation that proved too irresistible. She was not able to have a phone with her and not talk on it. This included class, home, dinner, car, wherever.

22

I had this exact same problem. I went out and bought a second hand Pentium III processor computer and plugged it into a dial up connection.

Can my kids get myspace? Yes, but it is so darn slow they don’t ever go on it.

And the dial up is plenty fast to get to the sites where they only need to READ information.

Cost = $75.00 Computer, Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse.

Actually I love it, if you don’t download or watch videos I can do all I need on that computer, Oh yeah get Win95, and that’ll stop the kids from installing most anything cool.

:slight_smile:

23

[QUOTE=Nman]
I had this exact same problem. I went out and bought a second hand Pentium III processor computer and plugged it into a dial up connection.
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I was going to mention the idea of giving everyone their own login account and then setting the parental permissions on the kids’ accounts (Mac OS X has what appear to be fairly-good parental permissions, and I presume Windows has the same), but your idea is brilliant, Nman.

24

[QUOTE=Drum God]
All I’ve done is given her a limited user account that prevents her from installing software. So, the IM software isn’t even available to her. So far, that seems to have held her at bay.
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:: nods ::

Simply putting “myspace.com” instead of “*.myspace.com” didn’t work?

And my parents used to get after me because I obsessively read everywhere I went with them…

25

Damn. She found a proxy server.

Well, I’ve blocked that, but maybe she knows another one.

Or, I could simply give up and let her flunk out of her senior year in high school. It’s her life.

So, anyone got advice on how to get a smart, underachieving girl through high school? :frowning:

Sadly, this means that she has probably learned of and used that proxy at school. Such things are verboten. If the IT guys find out, she’ll be done for. I may need to look up the consequences for using a proxy and see if they might help the situation.

26

[QUOTE=Drum God]
Or, I could simply give up and let her flunk out of her senior year in high school. It’s her life.
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Then again, as long as she lives under your roof and it operates as a loving, benevolent dictatorship, do what you need to do. Teenagers think they will live forever, they think they know everything and you are so not with it that you are irrelevant.

Until they need something from you to maintain their fantasy of life.

Keep at it for your own mental and emotional well-being until she turns legal age. At that point, don’t make a special effort anymore to always repair her fantasy of life balloons. It’s been my experience this approach means when she flies from the nest, she won’t feel pushed nor feel the door will lock behind her.

BTW, why not require her to use Firefox so you can install an anti-Flash extension as well?

27

Speaking as a formerly Internet [BBS, actually] obsessed teen, there’s not much you can do short of putting the computer in a place that is parent-monitored as long as the parents are awake, and then unplugging the modem when you go to bed and putting it under your pillow.

I’d suggest getting a router if you don’t already have one and using its security settings to keep her out - but there’s nothing keeping her from unplugging the modem from the router and plugging her machine in directly.

I don’t know what you can do for her at school - perhaps just let her get caught.