Re: Internet sanitising s/w

Quoted message said:

capitalise on her net awareness and teach her the same strategies you
use to avoid content you don't like: How to recognise where it is
likely to be (eg pron banners on warez sites); how to combat it it when
she stumbles across it (you dpn't have to believe/do what it says on
the screen, it is ok to shut it down) and what to do if she finds
herself in a situation she feels uncomfortable with (eg turn off the
monitor if caught in an unpleasant blizzard of pop-ups and come and
find you). Nanny software can also be helpful, as can a browser with
effective ad/popup filtering (crucially, with an interface that she
can drive) but net awareness skills are the long term solution and you
are the best teacher for that

On the other hand, if a child *wants* to find the stuff, they will
outwit most software. An 8 year old probably can't, but I remember
Computer Shopper magazine testing web filtering software once. The
author of the article offered his 12 year old daughter £5 if she could
switch off the filtering software. She did, every single one of them.

If you really want to lock stuff down, give the child a limited user
account, pick a strong admin password, pick a strong BIOS password,
disable booting from floppy or CDROM and then stick a padlock on the
case (otherwise it's trivial to reset the BIOS using the relevant
jumper). I often have to break into people's PCs when they've locked
themselves out and it's really, really, easy with stuff like this:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

Zog The Undeniable <[email hidden]> wrote:

: On the other hand, if a child *wants* to find the stuff, they will
: outwit most software.

Begin BOFH mode...

That's why you use a transparent proxy on another machine running the
internet connection, and keep it in a locked cupboard 🙂

End BOFH mode.

Seriously, the above is the only really secure way of doing it, but is
a lot more work. Even then, things like Google's new Accelerator would
get round it if it was set up correctly.

Arthur

--
Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt
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