Yeah, but if the mom doesn’t care and the kid lives at her house, this isn’t of any help in the long run. astro is looking for something that hopefully he has some level of control over and will be extremely hard to undo/get around.
These types of programs are a joke. Any tech savvy kid can get around them. He can download the latest workaround from a different computer and apply it on the home computer. More importantly, who decides what is banned and what is not? Many of these so called "parental control’ programs have their own political/social/morals/religious agenda implemented by the application owner, and offer no configuration changes by the license purchaser.
Which is enough to stop your kids, since you live with them, but if the mom isn’t willing to put her foot down and prevent this there’s little the OP can do remotely.
ETA: Though with a router with dd-wrt, the OP can set it up so he can administer it remotely. Will the factory reset button change back to the default firmware once it’s been flashed with dd-wrt or something similar? I’m not sure, I use dd-wrt but don’t have to deal with any cat and mouse games like this…
Ferret Herder and lazybratsche—Point taken. Once someone has unbridled access to the hardware, all bets are off.
There are workarounds for the more common netnanny programs, but there are MANY that are extremely difficult to get around. Many don’t show up in the task manager or processes running, and without knowing what the program is, you can’t get a workaround. These programs are designed for corporate as well as home use and are not the trivial netnannies you’re used to hearing about. There is a whole world of this type of spy/controlware that goes far beyond blocking kids’ access to online websites.
All his son has to do is do a web search on how to boot up a Linux box in single-user mode and he’ll have full privileges.
Agreeing with **Duckster **… the computer games aren’t the problem. They’re the *symptom *of a problem. Methinks the WoW stuff can’t even begin to be resolved until the OP and the kid’s mother can communicate and be on the same page about goals and priorities.
Whether or not that’s possible, I don’t know. But I do know that’s where this needs to start.
Not many will survive a wipe and re-install.
Take away the discs and uninstall the program take away his admin rights problem solved its a simple solution
I don’t have a solution, I just wanted to encourage you to not in any way whatsoever give up on it. I have had close, personal contact with online gaming destroying lives, very literally. Don’t count on it stopping by itself, don’t count on consequences stopping it.
If he’s got a noticeable problem now, then you have to address it seriously and aggressively now if you care about your son’s future.
Until Mom gets on board, and sister, with thinking it’s a problem, you’ll only be making it worse, whatever you do. It’s going to manifest as you wanting control, to them.
If you’re right, bide your time, they’ll come around when he won’t bathe and gets tossed from school.
If you don’t present a united front, you’re each just screwing the kid up more. Tread carefully.
I’m kind of in the same boat as Stoid. Don’t give up on trying to solve this.
I let my brother live in my house for a couple of years and he had this problem big-time. He once quit a job because they wouldn’t let him hang up in the middle of a support call with a customer at the exact instant his shift ended - he had to finish the call first. Well, he wasn’t going to put up with anything that might make him late for guild events on WoW, so he quit.
Eventually, three whole weeks passed in which he didn’t speak a single word to me… and then spoke only when he stormed out of his room to cuss at me for using the microwave, which he believed slowed down his connection to the Internet. I asked him to move out after that and, unfortunately, have not heard from him since. WoW addicts may not end up in emergency rooms like meth users, but they sure mess up their lives to the same degree.
One of the things I did while he was with me was to change the settings on our network’s router so that network access was flat out disabled from midnight to 8 am. He bought a laptop around the same time, and I have little doubt that he just went out and leeched off of unsecured networks in the neighborhood. But at least my wife and I could get some sleep.
I even had him working for me for a while and discovered that he had some kind of web-based portal that would still let him play WoW without installing anything. Maybe my understanding is wrong on that, but that’s what it looked like on the monitoring software I use at my office.
So there really is not anything the OP can do that will be effective for very long. With the concerted help of the mother and sister, they’d still be fighting a very difficult battle.
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I find this solution, most feasible.
If someone is addicted to alcohol or drugs, it’s well-known that you can’t get them to quit unless they acknowledge that they have a problem and want to quit.
That’s precisely the point, and right on the money.
It can function exactly like every other addiction you’ve ever heard of. It can take over a person’s life to the point where absolutely nothing matters except the fix of playing. Dracoi’s experience with his brother is not at all unusual.
And in the same way as other addictions, it has to be addressed in a very serious and major way…intervention, treatment, etc. The person who is heading down that rode needs to be dealt with the same way you deal with an alcoholic.
Treat it seriously, because it is serious.
It creeps me out that there is no answer for this aside from cutting off the internets.
If not for the kid living with an ambivalent parent, there are plenty of workable options. They take upkeep and monitoring to stay ahead of the game, but they’re there. The wrench thrown in here is the distance.
The analogy of driving a car comes to mind.
You can come up with all kinds of incentives, rules, devices, legal threats, and so on in order to make sure someone doesn’t drive while drunk, but at the end of the day, the only real way to guarantee that they don’t drive their car would be to put a boot on it.
For example, if someone has an ignition interlock in their car, they have a buddy breathe into it.
Not a perfect analogy, but enough to show that there are other situations in life where the only real way to prevent doing something is to cut off access.
Perhaps the reason why we don’t have to lock up the car of everyone who has had a drink is because the legal and social repercussions of drunk driving are far more onerous than what one faces when they sneak onto the Internet to play WoW.
Not the nicest approach, but what about wrecking save-game files? If you can do it ‘anonymously’ he might just give up on his own out of frustration.
An ignition interlock might work for somebody who doesn’t want to drive drunk. But if the person thinks it’s OK to drive drunk and the ignition interlock is an overreaction or an infringement of their rights, then they’ll find ways around the ignition interlock.
I suspect the same applies here. If astro’s son knows he has a problem with online gaming and wants to quit doing it, uninstalling the game (or some other technological solution) might work to help bolster his willpower. If he thinks the amount of time he spends playing is fine and astro is overreacting, he’ll find ways around a technological solution. It won’t work for the same reason that pouring out all the alcoholic beverages in the house won’t work to stop an alcoholic from drinking, or throwing out all the cigarettes in the house won’t work to make a smoker quit.
If curing an addiction were that simple, addiction wouldn’t be nearly the problem it is. There wouldn’t be all the 12-step and other programs for treating addiction that there are.
Even if you did manage to find a technological solution that kept him from playing online games, it wouldn’t work any more if he decided to move out and live on his own or with roommates who weren’t interested in controlling his gaming. We’ve all seen people whose parents wouldn’t let them have something at home who go crazy indulging in it when they move out.
The problem won’t go away when he graduates from high school, or moves out on his own. He’ll still be your son when he’s not living with you or his mother. You’ll still care if he’s wrecking his life with online gaming. But you won’t be able to use a technological solution to keep him from doing it any more.