No, just moderated comments.
So list a couple – you apparently have a thousand to choose from.
That’s a fair speculation.
I have a little sed/awk chron job that runs twice a day and scrapes the privoxy log for denials – in other words, if I see he tried to get somewhere and was denied, and I can then add it without his having to ask. But it’s true that he may get frustrated by not being able to follow links at will. On the whole, and again remembering he’s 12, I am fine with the trade off. I think by the time he’s 14, that may not be so.
- Do you have any unsecured wireless access points that are within range of your house?
- Are there any unsecured wireless access points within the range of his school, the mall, or any other place where he is regularly at?
- Are there still none even using a wireless signal booster, some of which can be made out of pringles cans?
- Are you confidant that there’s no way that he could socially engineer the wireless password from any of the neighbours encrypted wifi networks? Are you still confidant given the knowledge that even untrained people have managed to socially engineer sensitive passwords from trained network security professionals?
- Does he have, or could he acquire the $50 required to buy a cheap android tablet?
- Does he have a door on his bedroom or some other way to ensure privacy such that you can’t know what he’s doing with the door closed?
- Do you regularly search his room for contraband that could be as small as a paperback book? Are you confidant that you could discover all of the possible hiding spots? Does this confidence extend to the entire house and anything within a 5 minute walking distance?
- Do you have any way to monitor his activities after you’ve gone to sleep. ie: 24/7 video surveillance in his room that you make it a regular point to check? (my parents did the “put the PC in the living room” thing. I simply surfed the web from 1am to 4am every night and never got caught.)
- Do you ever run errands or leave the house in a way such that he’s alone without adult supervision for up to half an hour at a time?
- Is your house wrapped up in a faraday cage or any other scheme such that cellphone signals do not work? Does this also include the rest of your immediate neighbourhood?
- Does he have or could acquire the $330 necessary to purchase a chromebook that comes with 100MB a month of free LTE data?
- Are you confidant that, even if he couldn’t buy it legitimately, none of his friends could have given him one or traded him one for something else?
- Does he ever hang out with friends not in the presence of adults for at least 2 minutes necessary to make an exchange? Does this include going to the toilet or other places where adult surveillance would be highly inappropriate?
- Have you informed every adult about your internet restrictions and are you confidant that all of them would be willing to side with you vs keeping a secret for your kid?
If you missed any of these, then there’s a way for your kid to gain unfettered internet access without you being able to do anything about it.
*Are you sure that your son is not, in fact, a diminutive Russian hacker?
To be honest, i think people are giving 12 yr olds waaaaay to much hacker cred. Yes, i am willing to bet they could Facebook circles around me but most aren’t repartioning drives and setting up proxy servers.
- Do you have any unsecured wireless access points that are within range of your house?*
No.
Are there any unsecured wireless access points within the range of his school, the mall, or any other place where he is regularly at?
No. He doesn’t get to go to the mall unsupervised.
- Are there still none even using a wireless signal booster, some of which can be made out of pringles cans?*
No. I used SSIDer to identify all the traffic in the area.
Are you confidant that there’s no way that he could socially engineer the wireless password from any of the neighbours encrypted wifi networks? Are you still confidant given the knowledge that even untrained people have managed to socially engineer sensitive passwords from trained network security professionals?
Reasonably confident. Not 100%, to be sure. But at his present level of interaction with the neighbors, I am very confident.they’re not sharing passwords.
- Does he have, or could he acquire the $50 required to buy a cheap android tablet?*
No. He’s 12. He gets $6 per week allowance and spends it.
- Does he have a door on his bedroom or some other way to ensure privacy such that you can’t know what he’s doing with the door closed?*
Yes.
- Do you regularly search his room for contraband that could be as small as a paperback book? Are you confidant that you could discover all of the possible hiding spots? Does this confidence extend to the entire house and anything within a 5 minute walking distance?*
No regular searches.
- Do you have any way to monitor his activities after you’ve gone to sleep. ie: 24/7 video surveillance in his room that you make it a regular point to check? (my parents did the “put the PC in the living room” thing. I simply surfed the web from 1am to 4am every night and never got caught.)*
No, but I have network monitoring that runs 24/7 and tells me if any device goes offline.
Do you ever run errands or leave the house in a way such that he’s alone without adult supervision for up to half an hour at a time?
No. He’s 12.
Is your house wrapped up in a faraday cage or any other scheme such that cellphone signals do not work? Does this also include the rest of your immediate neighbourhood?
No, cellphone signals work fine.
- Does he have or could acquire the $330 necessary to purchase a chromebook that comes with 100MB a month of free LTE data?*
No.
- Are you confidant that, even if he couldn’t buy it legitimately, none of his friends could have given him one or traded him one for something else?*
Yes. He’s 12. His friends are 12. None of them have $330.
*
- Does he ever hang out with friends not in the presence of adults for at least 2 minutes necessary to make an exchange? Does this include going to the toilet or other places where adult surveillance would be highly inappropriate?*
Of course he does.
- Have you informed every adult about your internet restrictions and are you confidant that all of them would be willing to side with you vs keeping a secret for your kid?
“Every adult?” In North America?
No.
There are obviously mathematically possible ways. My child could be a clone of a diminutive Russian hacker, with implanted 4G wifi sensing.
But every risk you’ve hinted at, above, is so unlikely that they are all perfectly acceptable risks. And I remind you that you said, “Trivially.”
In a year or two, when he’s hanging out on his own, I recognize that the situation will change. But at present, he’s not unsupervised for any significant amount of time outside the home, or indeed inside the home.
You forgot the library. I’m a librarian, and let’s just say it’s not unusual for patrons to use library computers to look at porn.
It is mostly adult men who do this sort of thing, though. I don’t have a cite now, but I remember reading an article about a public library that wanted to find out whether content filters were really necessary to prevent kids from accessing pornography on the computers in the children’s section. They monitored what sites were being visited, and found that the kids weren’t particularly interested in looking at porn and that when adult sites were visited it seemed to be because the kids were showing off or daring each other to break the rules. They’d do a search on “naked boobies” or something, open up the main page of a porn site, and then typically navigated away pretty quickly.
Now, 12 is old enough for a boy to be getting a lot more curious about naked boobies, but Bricker said that he’s worried about the more extreme content on the Internet and not so much the boobie pictures. Again though, I don’t believe it’s that common to stumble across extreme content by accident. Bricker, are you concerned about your son finding tentacle porn and the like by mistake, or are you concerned that he’s going to go looking for tentacle porn on purpose? If the former then your setup is probably pretty effective, but just teaching your son to be careful about what links he clicks on would likely be almost as effective. I’d be more worried about malware disguised as something innocent than tentacle porn.
If the latter, well, where there’s a will there’s a way. He doesn’t even need the Internet. About 20 years ago, when I was just a little older than Bricker’s son, my best friend somehow obtained a pirated VHS copy of tentacle rape “classic” Legend of the Overfiend. I refused to watch it with her because it sounded super gross, but if I’d shared her morbid curiosity then I could have been watching tentacle porn on the TV in my best friend’s basement rec room with her parents right upstairs and none the wiser. This was the dial-up era, but today it seems like it would be pretty easy to get a friend to burn some videos or just watch them on the friend’s phone.
Really? At 13? That seems a little… restrictive, assuming all the other kids in his peer group hang out at the mall.
If he’d be the only teenager, then yeah, I get it.
Correct. Hell, I have all four seasons of Game of Thrones available on my DLNA server – I don’t think he’s watched it but I don’t take any measures to stop him. And there are one or two instances in that series which transcend mere naked boobies. But they’re in service of a story narrative and I don’t think they’ll scar him.
He’s 12. None of his friends hang out at the mall.
Can he go to Facebook?
Can he go to YouTube?
Most people do not change their Wi-fi router passwords. Those passwords are batched. If your son can read the key off the back of router the cable company gave you, he can get into your neighbor’s networks. (Yes, everyone, go change your wi-fi passcode. It’s not random.). Not saying that your son will be hacking networks, but it is far easier than you think. There is always someone around with an unprotected network as well. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Same reason my MIL keeps clicking on that adware box that pops up.
Also, very, very likely that time at friends’ houses will not be as well protected as you would like either. By 11 we were looking at friends’ big brothers’ magazines. Granted, we were girls and we were laughing our heads off at idiot brothers. The point is that pre-teens are doing a lot more than you think they are, white list server or no.
I think what I and others have tried to say is that you are probably deluding yourself.
You have asked for a better system.
There isn’t anything foolproof.
Again, I would suggest the best analogy is sex ed. Talk to him. Filter now, but prepare him. I would argue it’s probably already late in the game, but do it anyway.
Bricker, your concern is not appropriate
I’m asking the question with no snark or criticism intended, but is it typical for 12 year olds to be constantly supervised where you are?
I’m in my mid-30s, but when I was 12 I was the supervision. I took the red-cross course and was babysitting for my parents’ friends (and unofficially babysitting family members for a few years already). And I don’t recall anyone in my peer-group not being allowed to hang out unsupervised.
Bricker, here’s a simple way that your son could get around all of your protections, as well as almost any other protection you could think of, and it doesn’t require any particular level of skill on his part:
Step 1: One of his friends’ parents aren’t quite as vigilant as you are, and their kid manages to get past their security and downloads Teen Titans tentacle porn.
Step 2: That kid loans your son a thumb drive containing the TTTP.
Possible variation: Replace “friend” with “local school real-life troll who just likes screwing with everyones’ heads”, and now he’s getting the really freaky stuff.
No to Facebook, no to Youtube.
The cable company didn’t give me a router. I own my own router, and there is no “key” on the back of it. Are you thinking of the WPS vulnerability?
As I believe I explained above, I can look at all the WiFi traffic in range using an application called inSSIDer. No one around has an unprotected network. No open around even has a WEP-protected network, which frankly is about the same as “unprotected.”
Of the five signals visible from here, none are susceptible to basic dictionary attacks.
I didn’t. I asked if the concerns I had that led me to create my current system were reasonable.
And then he gets home, and plugs it in, and it doesn’t mount. Because his computer is a member of my AD domain, and I have a GPO that disables mounting USB devices. And his BIOS settings are set to boot only from the internal SATA.
Now, I grant you he could open the box, find the motherboard jumper that allows him to override the need for a BIOS password, and then change the boot device settings. But that would trigger the case open flag as well as show up in Nagios as a lost connection. So if he went that far, my technical controls don’t stop him, but they show what happened.
Could you explain what your concerns actually are? I still don’t understand whether you’re worried about your son stumbling across tentacle porn, etc., by accident or if you’re worried that he’s going to be seeking this kind of thing out on purpose.
If the former, I think you are vastly overestimating the odds of accidentally finding tentacle porn when one isn’t looking for it. I’ve been using the Internet for years and I’ve never seen tentacle porn. Heck, I used to live in Japan and I’ve never seen tentacle porn. It’s out there, but he’s not likely to find it unless he goes looking for it.
I got to say, it’s pretty hilarious how many posts in this thread are trying to show how Broker’s hacker genius 12 yr old is so totally get around his rather insanely secure home computer system. All ignoring the actual question of the OP, i.e. would it be so bad if the kid did.
Personally, I have no kids but i think the only real concern is online predators or bullies. Those guys can sneak into forums that you would consider safe normally. So as a couple of the earlier responders mentioned, communication with and educating your child is probably the best defense.
About four years ago, I found it doing a search for Teen Titans videos, and I assure you with every fiber of my being I had no intention of seeing it.
But my concern isn’t specifically tentacle porn – the term is a proxy for what I guess I’ll call weird shit. I’m not worried about the mainstream media appearance of naked breasts – as I said above, I don’t try to hide “Game of Thrones,” although he’s not shown any interest in the show, but the level of nudity and sex that appears on that show would represent a good upper limit for what I wouldn’t worry about.