I got great mileage out of Glubble when my kids were younger. It’s a Firefox plugin, so if you’re not already using Firefox, you’ll need to change browsers … It’s perfectly designed for a parent who wants to use whitelists rather than blacklists and active content filtering. There’s a family web page you can set up that lets you post calendar items and messages viewable by everybody. And when a child tries to access a page that’s not on the whitelist, they get a popup with a choice to either have a parent enter the administrator password to unblock it, or to send an unblock request to the family page. The parent, logged in as the family admin to the parent page, will see the pages with unblock requests, can click the links to review them, and either approve or deny the requests. Very slick, and I never had any problems with it.
Missed the edit window–just wanted to mention that the family page is usable from any browser, or at least any that I’ve used. It’s just the kids’ computer that needs to be using Firefox as the web browser. And it comes with a starting whitelist with some great kids’ website on it.
One option you can use is OpenDNS.
You configure the machine to use OpenDNS for domain name lookups, and then you log in to your free OpenDNS account and tweak whitelists and blacklists to your heart’s content.
You can configure your router to use OpenDNS for lookups, thereby making the default for your home the “child friendly zone,” and then set your personal machine’s DNS server to something different (e.g. your ISP’s DNS server), so you can get to the rest of the Internet.
It’s good for young kids, but it isn’t perfect; teenagers searching for dirty pictures will bypass this in a heartbeat, but at least it will have to be a conscious effort on their part (like a padlock, it keeps the honest people honest).
Thank you very much for the suggestions. Firefox is my (our) browser of choice, so I will evaluate Glubble first (being free and seemingly easy to use), but definitely check out NetNanny and OpenDNS meanwhile.
The kids are 7, 5, and 3, so all suggestions are great as far as I can see.
Edit: CookingWithGas, I’ll google that and see what I find. Thanks.
Censorship software like NetNanny are a joke, and often have hidden agendas. Granted, your kids are quite young and may not possess the skills to circumvent these types of programs, yet. At the same time the manufacturers of these applications often do not share their embedded master blacklists with parents. So you have no way of knowing what is or is not blocked, nor the reasoning behind the blocks.
The information already provided where you as a parent are able to make your own decisions about what amount of access you grant your child are the way to go.
Definitely a valid point, Duckster, and thanks for the link. My goal right now is to avoid the situation when the kid klicks on an ad and are redirected and clicks on a link, and so on, only to end up on a site with very graphical content. When they get old enough to want to see crap of whatever kind they want to, I can only hope that my upbringing and their character is enough for them not to explore it too deeply – because at that time there is no way for me as a parent to technically stop it.
Since my last post I’ve been downloading, exploring and configuring Glubble, and it does exactly what I wanted. Many thanks, SCSimmons!
But I’ll tell yuo what I’ve done. I’m running Privoxy, an open-source web proxy and whitelist-capable application.
It’s running on a secure Linux box that’s locked in the basement office. That Linux box is dual-homed, with one interface going in (the Ethernet from my kid’s room and a WiFi AP that’s using WEP) and an interface out to the rest of the network. All MACs in use on the general network are white-listed at the router, which is also physically secured. My child’s MAC address is NOT on that white list.
So basically, the only way he gets traffic out of his computer is through that proxy server, and only to the addresses I whitelist. The WiFi AP is there so he can use Nintendo DS games with wireless capability; all of those go to nintendo.com, which is permitted in the routing tables for non-http traffic.
He’s not an admin on his local box, and even if he were to become one, it makes no difference – his traffic out of the room and into the Internet is controlled.
My theory is that when he can break THAT, he deserves to see anything he wants.
Using a computer you don’t control comes to mind. If you don’t keep your kid chained in the basement, he’ll get access to things you don’t want him to see. They did that before computers were invented, for that matter.
Like my OpenDNS setup, it is a padlock to keep the honest people honest.
From reading your post, it looks like the WEP access point access only the kid-safe net, no? Otherwise the proven insecurity of WEP would be a gaping hole.
The next gaping hole is the MAC address filtering. Network devices can masquerade as a different MAC, so if he finds out the address of an allowed device (not hard to do) he can copy that address. If the copied machine is turned off, he’s home free; otherwise there will be network collisions.
One way out of this MAC address problem would be to make an entirely different network for the kids, served from the Linux gateway box with appropriate filtering.
Bricker, and MinorFlat, thanks for the feedback. My point in post #10 is that when the kids are old enough to really try to get access to adult content on the internet, I can’t stop it, because they’re not necessarily using the parent controlled computer in their room exclusively. There will be friends and by that time they might very well have browsers on their phones and whatnot. As Der Thris is suggesting, there are a lot of ways to circumvent the rules of their parents, and I checked out porn magazines when I was thirteen; there was no way my parents could have done anything about it (and pictures of tits never hurt anybody).
My responsibility right now is to see to that my kids don’t stumble upon shit even an adult find disturbing. That’s why I said that by the time they want to see naked women or guys of whatever their curiosity leads them to, I need to trust their judgement, and the character of theirs I’m still able to influence, to settle for nudeness.
That being said, I appreciate your tips which might help me delay their venture into the darker places of the net, because we all know that there’s so much out there a young brain don’t need to digest.
Wow, I’ve been using openDNS for years, and didn’t know you could do that type of thing. Cool. Not that I have a lot of reason to do this, but it’s still good to know.
I have that – both the WEP and his room’s hard-wired Ethernet connection access only the kid-safe network that’s connected to the Linux Privoxy box. so it’s both a router and an http proxy, with whitelisted addresses. The rest of the house uses a separate WPA2 AP or wired connections that go to a different aggregator switch.
