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My kids at 9 and 10 are now really starting to head around the place on the Internet. I trust them, and we have the kids computer where the screen faces the family room (nothing better than family supervision ). Having said that, they are smart, they are kids, and they are curious, and pop ups / dubious links are everywhere, so I've decided its time to put in place the "just in case" software.
Basically the kids just browse and play online games. So I trying to decide what is the best, non intrusive protection for their machine. I've read the NetNanny blurb, but that appears to be all intrusive software on the actual PC. I was wondering about a proxy with URL filtering known blacklists on my server and just pointing their browser through that?
I'm sure others have done this. What's an elegant, cheap, non intrusive solution? I'd like to be able to review successful and failed sites if the need arises (ie one dobs on the other )
I have a fully wired network for the machines in question, dedicated kids machine, server on 24 x 7 with 2 x Ethernet if required, ADSL2+ connection. I can't see the kids getting to, or yet understanding IP setups, so technical workarounds are not concerning me.
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Too many toys is still not enough.
There's a specific plugin for firefox also that does a brilliant job from what I understand.
It's community based so a number parents have to vet and approve a site before it's listed in the pool of available sites to go to.
If you lock off IE and give them firefox then I'm led to believe it works very well. Comes with a full set of tools for you to monitor their access and grant/deny access to any given site based on a number of criteria like age etc. Can't think of the name of it at the moment but I'm sure it's fairly easy to find.
The fact that it's community driven by real parents as apposed to based on code and word search etc makes it appealing as it's likely highly reliable.
Cheers,
Arkay.
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The box said 'Requires Windows XP or better' - so I installed Linux . . .
DDH.
don't listen to Craig.... (might just be gullible, or lives in a different country and doesn't know what's happening at home )
.....they can't be trusted after the age of ten
I don't have kids, but this suggestion is good, I talk to young people as they are adults, have 5 nephews , works well. They like me, as I don't treat them as children. Some time they hate me, but it is life. Parents treat them as children - big mistake.
__________________ Linux World Domination... One Joke at a Time :)
I have kids and I've found it's better to treat them as people. Individuals, which they are. In saying that though I believe I have a duty to protect my children from exposure to things that children aught not be exposed to. The internet is one of those things.
It's up to the individual parent to judge the mental awareness of each child to determine if they are able to cope with stimuli of any given nature. There are guides to help, like TV/Movie ratings. There is a reason things are rated M 15+, R etc. No similar rating system exists for internet content.
Sadly I see time and time again where many parents don't police their childrens viewing. Like 7 year olds being allowed to watch Terminator, The Mummy and the Indiana Jones movies.
What they fail to understand is that what goes over their head now their minds will one day begin to grasp and it's at that point that it causes issues.
Any way you look at it a very large portion of the internet is inappropriate and too easy to get to for young children and they need to be protected from that.
Childhood is a short lived experience as it is, why shorten it further by exposing them to things beyond their comprehension now. It has the double edged effect of distressing them when they do become aware and robbing them of experiences they will enjoy better for the first time later in life.
Cheers,
Arkay.
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The box said 'Requires Windows XP or better' - so I installed Linux . . .
Childhood is a short lived experience as it is, why shorten it further by exposing them to things beyond their comprehension now. It has the double edged effect of distressing them when they do become aware and robbing them of experiences they will enjoy better for the first time later in life.
Cheers,
Arkay.
I was aware of the horrible reality's of life yeas before my parents exited their lala land with their perception of what I should know.
Without even knowing who is Indiana Jones
__________________ Linux World Domination... One Joke at a Time :)
*Disclaimer* I am an Enterprise Product Manager / Technical Specialist with Trend Micro in the Web Security space.
Also as an FYI - the AU Govt tools were cracked by a teenager days after they were announced - not really worth using.
As this is my specialty area as web security is the line of business I am in - hopefully I can help here.
The easiest solution is as someone has mentioned, Linux & Squid - but that’s great for the proxy side of things but not for access control.
The biggest issue right now out there is time to protection - as websites are developed with UI / end user experience first and security is usually left off the table. What this means is today when you visit a site, you have no way to know if that site was maliciously hacked in the last day, hour or min. Whilst this may be of primary concern to enterprise businesses, the same can be said for home users. Having technology that evaluates the risks against several different known factors to provide a "health" rating is what you need.
On the light end of the scale, Trend has a tool called Trend Protect. It is free to download, but all it does is show you the URL's reputation - does not prevent you from going there. it is similar to McAfee Site Advisor, but Site Advisor is still database based - where as Trend Protect uses in the cloud references to have up to the second details of a particular site.
Moving on from that you have usually your desktop AV. Most of the top 3 vendors (Trend, Symantec, McAfee) offer some sort of URL protection / access prevention in their consumer product. On the Trend side we use again the URL Reputation however this time prevent access.
The other solution is to run the Enterprise IWSx product at the gateway. This is probably not feasible for most home users, but never say never. Basically what you can do is put IWSx in front of Squid process and have your proxy cache always considered dirty - thus any access, files / downloads will always be scanned.
To give you an example, I have a old laptop (1.8Ghz system / 2GB RAM) here (running a whole bunch of other stuff such as VMware instances) with Squid / IWSS 3.1 Linux - and everything is nice and happy - big WAF factor as now she can join in with all her friends on the social pages such as facebook and still be protected (you would be amazed to see the stats of how much malicious content is on those types of sites).
The latest product I have worked on is IWSVA - basically drop the CD into a machine and 10 mins later you have a complete software appliance up and running - either on bare metal or running inside a VM.
Feel free to drop me any emails on here if anyone would like to run that sort of protection at home - I am sure we can work something out.
). Having said that, they are smart, they are kids, and they are curious, and pop ups / dubious links are everywhere, so I've decided its time to put in place the "just in case" software.
) 
