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My kids aged 10 and 8 years, are slowly getting to know the internet. They are mostly playing online games on friv.com or sending emails to other kids from school. We are limiting their time at the computer to at most 1 hour daily, and we are supervising, checking on them every 10 minutes or so, or using "x11vnc -viewonly -display :0". Also I have modified the "/etc/hosts" to include stuff from a (now defunct) site which contains about 1500 lines that block various unwanted sites where each line looks like "127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net". Also I modified "/etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf" to include line "*.* @my_pc" so that all the computers report back to me (and I have lwatch running on my administration desktop). But I still feel that this is not enough, and I want your advice about protecting kids from the dangers of internet.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by michealpwalls on Monday April 21 2014, @10:22PM
Wow you really over-thought this, in my opinion.
Don't get me wrong, you're not going to hear some fluffy "free-range baby" junk from me, as I actually have kids. 2 boys in fact.
Ages 5 and 7, my boys have a Google Account. Their browser never clears that session and so, wherever they go, they're logged into their Google Account. You might think "Gee, isn't that the opposite of what you want?" but no think about it. When you create a Google, Bing or Yahoo account and set an age below 13, you are automatically blacklisted from many things, including adult advertisements and comments..
Yet the kids can still find and consume the massive amounts of educational materials that are available online, including YouTube.
With the approach you have taken, I wonder if you have missed the forest from the trees... You can blacklist domains until you're blue in the face and still have your child looking at "Booty shake" or even "snuff" videos on YouTube by simply typing the wrong search term.
My kids use Fedora which runs Chromium. Google is the homepage and as I said above, it preserves their session so as not to log them out. It's extremely simple and so far it has been extremely effective.
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Monday April 21 2014, @10:59PM
Interesting idea. I didn't mention that in my case it's two daughters, because I wanted this "ask soylent" to be more generic. But it seems that all answers so far focus on boys only.
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(Score: 2) by michealpwalls on Monday April 21 2014, @11:27PM
I can see how my overly-simplistic approach would begin to break down as the children get older.
Also I forgot to add that while logged into Google/Yahoo/Bing accounts with an age of 13 years or less, the content is filtered automatically ("Safe Search" and such are turned on).
Of course, when they start to interact with other people online (Someone sends them a link via email/chat), the sort of things you came up with would probably be the only thing that works.
Kudos to you for being a responsible parent, by the way :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @12:00PM
"the massive amounts of educational materials that are available online, including YouTube."
Yeah, whatever, that's just this generations version of the 80s "buy a computer for educational software" when we knew darn well as kids that it was for games.
Mine are a bit older and YouTube is nothing but "blitzwinger plays yet another game" and "minecraft lets play" screencaps. For freaking hours on end.
Theoretically there are educational videos on YT. Much like you could buy a kid a TV because there are occasionally educational documentaries on PBS. Which won't be watched of course.
(Score: 2) by michealpwalls on Tuesday April 22 2014, @06:11PM
hehe it is true that for all the useful videos, there is probably 100s of junk
As hard to believe as it sounds, my kids genuinely do watch educational videos. Their favorite hands down is "Bill Nye the Science Guy" that they watch on YT (It doesn's seem to be on the Dish anymore...)
It's not easy, but if you can find the right content that catches and holds their attention, they can find educational things entertaining too.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @06:55PM
Mine also occasionally watch Bill. I was concerned that his attempts to be the pinnacle of hip coolness in 1985 would fly right over their heads making it unappealing, but it doesn't slow them down. I find it rather nostalgic.