[Gloucs] parental control

[Guy Edwards]

Hi Paul,

On Sat, 2004-10-30 at 08:50, Paul Robertson wrote:
> I am coming under pressure to implement some kind of parental control over 
> www access at home.
> We use both Windows and Linux and as our kids are quite young, the main 
> risks are of accidentally turning up unsuitable material on the web.
> It would be nice to block popup ads too.
> I assume this can all be done using a linux box as a firewall / proxy 
> webserver.
> Has anyone done this who can point me in the right direction?
> 
> Thanks,

At work I use squid with a list of sites to block that's maintained on
the web somewhere, I seem to remember following a link from the squid
site when I first set it up. Basically I have a text file with a (very
big) list of sites to block, that certain websites maintain. This file
can be massive with hardly any effect on squids speed (they're some
exact figures on the squid website I believe). To this file I add a list
of words that there's no reason to have in a url (imagine some bad
words... they're in there). Then I have another file which is
exceptions, e.g. containing legitimate words with banned words in them
like "middlesex", "cocktails" etc. Squid just looks at the two files as
it makes it's decisions. I've only had about 2 false positives that I
know of in about a year.

I don't use dans guardian but I seem to be the only person I know
running squid and not running it :-). To block adverts I use adzapper,
which just uses local images in place of certain adverts and replaces
some popup adverts with empty pages which close themselves immediately
using javascript. The rest of the things that are running probably
aren't relant but just for completeness: I also use ftwall to block
kazaa/fasttrack clients and I block certain IP's in IPtables due to
messaging client abuse.

For anyone who hasn't tried turning to the BOFH "dark side" of being a
mini sys admin, nothing beats the evil fun to be had having the web
access log scrolling past in a window as you're working and then when
you spot someone misbehaving, walking into their room and standing
behind the person at the workstation. "yes hello there sir, what's that
site? oh dear, breaking our usage agreement aren't we sir?". A variation
on that is when you're trying to work and one of the people in the room
with you blatantly isn't when they should be. If they're taking the mick
it's time to add their site to the blocked list. Sorry, just my bit of
tyranny, got to have some fun :-)

Back on topic, I think I remember the BBC recommended putting the family
PC in the living room so that nobody hid away on the pc, and so to
reduce the risk to children of predators in chatrooms. Might not be
practical but thought I'd mention it if it's of use.

Guy