Best Net-Nannty Type Software
- Thread starter Clocker
- Start date
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
Put the PC in the living room?
Just uncheck "load images".... :mrgrn:
Can one protect Firefox's/IE's settings somehow?
Another "good" idea would be to add Google and the rest of the most popular searches to the host list and point them to 127.0.0.1. Or put them on the firewall's/router's deny list.
Blake's idea is still very useful; it's the best way to monitor what the kids do with the computer, and monitor how long do they sit in front of it.
Jan
Can one protect Firefox's/IE's settings somehow?
Another "good" idea would be to add Google and the rest of the most popular searches to the host list and point them to 127.0.0.1. Or put them on the firewall's/router's deny list.
Blake's idea is still very useful; it's the best way to monitor what the kids do with the computer, and monitor how long do they sit in front of it.
Jan
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
Sorry for my brevity, but I do think that if you are worried about what your computer is being used for or what your children are exposed to you really should put the PC in an open, accessible location where you, can monitor what goes on. This involves effort on your part, but has the best results in my opinion.
I also believe that a parent needs to have some trust in their child, once the child is old enough you need to let them make their own decisions regarding what they want to search for. If you can't trust them, they shouldn't be using the PC.
Regarding child safe internet filters, honestly I've never seen one that I was impressed with. Much like an email spam filter it is easy for them to have false positives and block legitimate sites, while at the same time not blocking some abhorred content at other sites.
I also believe that a parent needs to have some trust in their child, once the child is old enough you need to let them make their own decisions regarding what they want to search for. If you can't trust them, they shouldn't be using the PC.
Regarding child safe internet filters, honestly I've never seen one that I was impressed with. Much like an email spam filter it is easy for them to have false positives and block legitimate sites, while at the same time not blocking some abhorred content at other sites.
Will Rickards
Storage Is My Life
Just wondering, blakewry do you have any kids?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Kids are bad.
Turn in the IE RSAC ratings. That'll cut the number of pages they can visit to about 7.
Turn in the IE RSAC ratings. That'll cut the number of pages they can visit to about 7.
I wonder if there is any way to "spy" on what websites are accessed from a certain internet account, rather than restricting what sites can be viewed on particular computers? I've heard of a program before that will send an e-mail to an address the user specifies, showing a history of websites visited. I'm not sure how that worked.
A forum member PM'd me about this software...looks like it will do the trick. Both spying and filtering.
http://www.integrity.com/
C
http://www.integrity.com/
C
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
Agreed. In fact, this is the only way a child can grow into a normal, healthy, thinking adult. The current climate of parents spying on their children in all sorts of ways is a disgusting trend. If a parent does a good enough job instilling some sort of inherent sense of right and wrong, they needn't worry about what their children do. In fact, it's only by internalizing these things that a child will err from wrongdoing. If the only reason a child won't do something is because they either fear they are being watched, or they fear punishment if caught, then the parent has failed miserably at their job. I've known children (and adults) like that. The minute controls are removed they're like wild animals let out of a cage.blakerwry said:
It seems to me Clocker that just the fact that your brother is asking about something like this means there are much deeper issues here. I know there are limits as to how far you can intrude upon the way your brother raises his children, but you might want to mention some of the points I brought up in as gentle a way as possible. I can possibly see filtering out the XX stuff if the children are very young since that's something they're not capable of dealing with yet, but no software will catch everything. At some point unfortunately children are going to be exposed to things adults would rather they not be. It's best to simply accept that and prepare your children as best you can. Kids are a lot more resilent than we give them credit for. It was the children in the city who bounced back quickest from the events of 9/11, for example.
P.S. I was exposed to the concept of "the birds and the bees" when I was about 7 or 8 I think. As for violence, I actually saw someone being killed on the subway in my mid teens. Oh, and I was regularly exposed to the derelicts of society on a daily basis once I started riding the trains to high school at age 14. None of this really had any traumatic effect on me because both my parents and my teachers, as well as living in a big city where bad things happen, prepared me for it. In many ways I think the current trend of having kids grow up in sterile suburbs and isolating them from adult things will produce a generation unable to cope with life's normal problems.
All I asked for was some software recommendations. :lol:
The situation with my brother's kids is much more complicated that you will ever know. One of them has emotional problems associated with a type of mild autism. To put it mildly, he has a hard time controlling himself and any urges he has in just about any situation. His access to the internet needs to be monitored and controlled. He's already gotten into the Pay-Per-View channels at grandma's house with some expensive & embarassing results.
C
The situation with my brother's kids is much more complicated that you will ever know. One of them has emotional problems associated with a type of mild autism. To put it mildly, he has a hard time controlling himself and any urges he has in just about any situation. His access to the internet needs to be monitored and controlled. He's already gotten into the Pay-Per-View channels at grandma's house with some expensive & embarassing results.
C
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
Ok, that changes things a lot if he has the problems you mentioned. Parenting can only do so much in a situation like that. My post was referring to children without such issues. Sorry about the lecture. :mrgrn: What brought it on is that I'm more than a little annoyed when I read about parents policing their children. Sure, you need a certain amount of healthy oversight but children need to make mistakes and sometimes get hurt to grow into complete adults, not live in an artificial environment where nothing bad is ever allowed to happen to them.
On the blocking thing, it's too bad that all the adult stuff isn't put into a .xxx domain as was being talked about at one time. This would make blocking it all that much easier. I personally don't care to see stuff like that myself 99% of the time.
On the blocking thing, it's too bad that all the adult stuff isn't put into a .xxx domain as was being talked about at one time. This would make blocking it all that much easier. I personally don't care to see stuff like that myself 99% of the time.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Actually, turning on the IE RSAC ratings and telling IE to disallow unrated pages is a hilarious office prank as well.
Which is how I know about it.
Which is how I know about it.
Groltz
My demeaning user rank is
Mercutio said:
Oh, now you've done it.
I already have a victim lined up at work. :diablo:
If there was just some way I could also sabotage the guy's color Blackberry that he runs around showing porn pics on.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Also, remember to set the parental password to something other than his login.
Howell
Storage? I am Storage!
Hi Groltz.
Groltz
My demeaning user rank is
Mercutio said:
Merc: I'll likely not password lock it, so he can eventually fix it himself when he figures it out. The opportunity to enable his content advisor won't come until he goes home early with locking his desk station, which is a fairly frequent occurrence.
Citizen Howell: Greetings! Also Doug, Tony, and David from the H.N.Y. thread!
Clocker: Hope you don't see this as a wanton thread hijacking...It seems like it went as far as it could on solving your question. I PM'ed you my $0.02 solution. :mrgrn: Good luck with your brother's kids.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Hey Clocker .... what did you expect? This is Storage Forum, isn't it? Sensible, on-topic answers to practical questions? Here? Nahhh.
And just by way of sticking with the well-trodden tradion, I'll ponder your question afresh .... Well, ponder the broader question behind your question. Maybe that will end up throwing some light on the practicalities in the end, maybe not.
What do you do with this issue? It's really, really tricky.
First up, forget software. If there is a practical, usable net nanny style of app that actually works properly, isn't relatively easy to get around (for the determined child), and doesn't totally screw up your system, then I'll cheerfully eat the box it comes in. (With or without salt.)
In fact, I suspect that this isn't a matter of no-one having written any decent net nanny software yet, but rather an inescapable reflection of the incredible complexity and subtlety of human culture, and in turn of the internet that mirrors and distorts culture. The task is beyond the capability of any software package yet devised, and probably beyond the capability of any software package that it is possible to imagine, short of an improvement in our ability to write code and build machines for it to run on similar in scale to the improvement that has taken place between the end of WW2 and today.
(BTW, I imagine that most net nanny apps rely on IE and its derivatives. If this is so, then you are immediately in deep trouble spyware and trojan-wise.)
So, if not software, what else is there? Parental supervision? Well, yes, sort of, but in the modern world, it ain't practical. No-one has the time, what with work commitments, needing to have an actual life of your own (and yes, every parent needs that in order to remain a real, fully human person and thus a good parent), and the many commitments on your time that an industrialised society makes. Worth the attempt, sure. But clearly not a complete answer.
Censorship at the source? Legislation, commitees checking content, all that stuff. Not a hope. It's (a) impossible, and (b) highly undesirable. You want to live in a police state, go book your ticket to Iran or possibly China right away. But even in those places, it doesn't work properly. (Thank God.)
Preparing your child so that he/she is able to make his/her own way in the world and make sense of things, so that the child understands and can make informed choices? Well, of course. But this takes far more parenting skill than most of us can lay claim to, or even sensibly aspire to. It's really, really difficult. There are just so many things we need to prepare a child for, we don't understand all of them ourselves, and the pace of the jackbooted march of commercial culture uninvited into our living rooms is such that only a fair-dinkum Super Dad can hope to catch up with it, let alone get far enough in front of it to head off evil influences. And the reality is, that Super Dads or Super Mums are very few and far between. In my life, I can think of two people I have ever met that I would class that way - i.e., as good enough mothers (they were both women - which may well be no coincidence) to really equip their children for life, including dealing with mass-media nasties, amongst other things. The key difficulty here is that you need to be able to understand the nasty in question (which is not always as easy as it seems) and understand and be able to communicate effectively with the child - not easy, and a very rare ability indeed. Hardly anyone understands children.
That seems to leave only one answer, and it's one that no-one here (except perhaps Mercutio, and maybe P5 and Clippy) would seriously contemplate. This is to simply unplug the damn thing.
Now myself, I'm not fussed about the internet, not especially. If I had children, I'd be relaxed about them having free and unrestricted access to it. But I am fussed about TV. If I had children, I'd not have a TV set in the house. No way. The outpouring of evil propaganda that comes out of a TV set every day makes internet porn and other assorted nasties look utterly trivial, quite beside the point. But no-one will agree with me here. (Again, except for the few I just mentioned, and one or two others - Mubs, I bet, is one.)
(PS: I think I'll just post this without reading it over, as otherwise I'll be tempted to edit it so that it makes sense, and after a half hour or so I'll realise that it's a task that would take weeks and just throw the whole post away.)
And just by way of sticking with the well-trodden tradion, I'll ponder your question afresh .... Well, ponder the broader question behind your question. Maybe that will end up throwing some light on the practicalities in the end, maybe not.
What do you do with this issue? It's really, really tricky.
First up, forget software. If there is a practical, usable net nanny style of app that actually works properly, isn't relatively easy to get around (for the determined child), and doesn't totally screw up your system, then I'll cheerfully eat the box it comes in. (With or without salt.)
In fact, I suspect that this isn't a matter of no-one having written any decent net nanny software yet, but rather an inescapable reflection of the incredible complexity and subtlety of human culture, and in turn of the internet that mirrors and distorts culture. The task is beyond the capability of any software package yet devised, and probably beyond the capability of any software package that it is possible to imagine, short of an improvement in our ability to write code and build machines for it to run on similar in scale to the improvement that has taken place between the end of WW2 and today.
(BTW, I imagine that most net nanny apps rely on IE and its derivatives. If this is so, then you are immediately in deep trouble spyware and trojan-wise.)
So, if not software, what else is there? Parental supervision? Well, yes, sort of, but in the modern world, it ain't practical. No-one has the time, what with work commitments, needing to have an actual life of your own (and yes, every parent needs that in order to remain a real, fully human person and thus a good parent), and the many commitments on your time that an industrialised society makes. Worth the attempt, sure. But clearly not a complete answer.
Censorship at the source? Legislation, commitees checking content, all that stuff. Not a hope. It's (a) impossible, and (b) highly undesirable. You want to live in a police state, go book your ticket to Iran or possibly China right away. But even in those places, it doesn't work properly. (Thank God.)
Preparing your child so that he/she is able to make his/her own way in the world and make sense of things, so that the child understands and can make informed choices? Well, of course. But this takes far more parenting skill than most of us can lay claim to, or even sensibly aspire to. It's really, really difficult. There are just so many things we need to prepare a child for, we don't understand all of them ourselves, and the pace of the jackbooted march of commercial culture uninvited into our living rooms is such that only a fair-dinkum Super Dad can hope to catch up with it, let alone get far enough in front of it to head off evil influences. And the reality is, that Super Dads or Super Mums are very few and far between. In my life, I can think of two people I have ever met that I would class that way - i.e., as good enough mothers (they were both women - which may well be no coincidence) to really equip their children for life, including dealing with mass-media nasties, amongst other things. The key difficulty here is that you need to be able to understand the nasty in question (which is not always as easy as it seems) and understand and be able to communicate effectively with the child - not easy, and a very rare ability indeed. Hardly anyone understands children.
That seems to leave only one answer, and it's one that no-one here (except perhaps Mercutio, and maybe P5 and Clippy) would seriously contemplate. This is to simply unplug the damn thing.
Now myself, I'm not fussed about the internet, not especially. If I had children, I'd be relaxed about them having free and unrestricted access to it. But I am fussed about TV. If I had children, I'd not have a TV set in the house. No way. The outpouring of evil propaganda that comes out of a TV set every day makes internet porn and other assorted nasties look utterly trivial, quite beside the point. But no-one will agree with me here. (Again, except for the few I just mentioned, and one or two others - Mubs, I bet, is one.)
(PS: I think I'll just post this without reading it over, as otherwise I'll be tempted to edit it so that it makes sense, and after a half hour or so I'll realise that it's a task that would take weeks and just throw the whole post away.)
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
Clocker said:
The problem is that hardware is called for here -- such as the aforementioned parent.
Perhaps the intelligent solution is to not allow the access to the Internet at all. If there's no time to teach them how to use something, then don't let them use it!
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Someone who has probably thought a great deal more about this subject than anyone here, and very likely the best person to ask, is your local librarian.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the various filtering companies have their own political bent. Some filter terms "gay", or "breast" or "Women's Rights" that might not be a problem for most people.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the various filtering companies have their own political bent. Some filter terms "gay", or "breast" or "Women's Rights" that might not be a problem for most people.