Beeker Studios

Full Disclosure: I'm not a parent, but I will be one soon. I have many nieces and nephews, and also a young brother (my in-law). For almost everyone in my family I am the go to guy when it comes to technology, and people trust me to understand this enough to help protect them, and their families as much as I know how to. That was the impetus in doing this.

Philosophy

Over at lifehacker on an open thread comment I started, this topic garnered some commentary on various things, one of them was definetly Philosophy. So that's why I'm starting with this, in this post.

There's 2 lines of thinking in regards to protecting a child's computer. One says, let a child explore but watch and guide, and engage in a discussion with them, but don't limit access to anything. The other takes a more military approach, and gives the child free reign on a computer, within a technologically created jail that one needs to put up.

The former is great, if your a parent who keeps a close watch on your kids usage of things like video games, cellphone usage (if they have one even, which is an entirely different philosophical question), and overall have a good understanding with your child about consequences of abuse of technology. I realize that's opinion, but this my mind dump, so that's what you're getting.

The latter is great, if you understand that kids are resourceful, often times more technologically embedded (at least sooner than most of us were), into the world of tech. I tried to find solutions to the problem that understood kids were curious, but they still need to be protected.

As they say, while the cats away the mouse will play. It's not necessarily about not trusting your kids, more about understanding how they think. They will do things when you're not looking, and you can't be looking 100% of the time, it's just impossible.

There are aspects of this post that can be used for all ages of kids, but for the most part a lot of this is geared at protecting young children, but the time limit accounts, and the filtered DNS servers can be used for older kids. One thing to note however is that blocking DNS, won't actually block access to a site by it's IP address, at which point if they were still getting to it by doing that, I'd be taking away their computer. Just my opinion.

Operating Systems

I'm a Mac guy, but unfortunately buying a cheap MAC for a kid is virtually impossible. One could hackintosh a computer, but if you're doing this for a family member, giving them a hacked OS on pc hardware is a recipe for disaster, even if the parents are halfway savvy. As much as I'd like that to be true it is not. You could of course just get an iPad device and have your child use that as it's "computer", but I have to admit there are some even more limiting factors to that, one of them being you can't actually limit time usage, so you'r kid could be up at 3am playing monkey ball on his or her iPad.

So this whole post is in regards to ONE OS, Windows 7, which is great.

If you're considering linux, you probably already know enough about all of this, to total defeat anything I would be saying about stuff that might still pertain to you, such as OpenDNS, or locking down a web browser.

With that said, for people with REALLY young kids, I might consider installing Sugar OS. It's a linux distribution that was actually developed for the OLPC. I really like some of the creative programs within it, it's unfortunate that they aren't available in windows form. It's not something I've had personal experience with, but I really like the idea, and I am also a proponent of Open Source solutions and Linux in general.

Down the rabbit hole

The reality is, if you're part of the first line of thinking you can get away with simply creating a standard account on a computer (with no admin privileges), and at a minimum limiting times the computer can't be used. Both of those would suffice to block installation of malicious software, and usage of the computer during times you can't monitor the usage. But even then I might consider using OpenDNS dns servers, at the least.

If you're part of the second line of thinking, well that's where some of my help is required.

Kid Accounts

If you don't want your kid to be playing video games the second he gets out of school, but want them to be able to type up an essay in a word processor, and do some research on predefined websites, you're going to want to limit access to games either during certain time periods, or even further for a given period of time. The easiest way to do that, is to create separate utilitarian accounts for different application access levels.

For my use, I created 2 accounts. One I called "Kidsname Learning", the other I called "Kidsname Timed Acct". For the "Kidsname Timed Acct", I gave them only access to the one game, that I want them to have limited time access to, and a web browser for more fun exploration. This account cannot be logged into, during late hours, or in the middle of the day when the kid is at school. We all know how kids love to take things with them to school, they know they are not supposed to. So if you do this, it will solve that issue pretty quickly once they realize they took their computer to school, and can't do anything with it.

Here's a chart on the proposed access:

If you have multiple kids, I might consider creating a general learning account, that gives them access to a subset of websites, and a word processor to do homework, and then a limited account for each child, with access to programs they individually use often. And then lastly a general "personal" account, that gives them access to their own iTunes library, and general more appropriate creative tools. I know this sounds excessive and like a lot of work, but the reality is you do it once, and then only need to update it or change it when a new program needs to be installed.

Limited Programs Menu

Even if/when you limit access to a program it still might show up in the start menu. If you don't want the kid to use internet explorer at all, ever, remove it from the start menu. This will be the simplest method to eliminate that from even being something they try and startup. Mind you at this point you've already only given access to a limited subset of programs. But if they know they can only run those few things in that account, they will know which account they want to login to do what activity.

Time Limiting

The kid will have unlimited or more lenient time in the Learning account, but time limitations on the "Timed Acct" account will be far more constraining. Perhaps 1 hour per day. And now you're wondering how you can do that. Well as of right now, I've only found one utility that is really geared towards that. It's called TimesUpKidz!, it kind of reminds of a cafe time usage program, except you have to manage the usage on the computer being used, and that kind of makes it limiting. There does seem to be another alternative for a similar situation called Time Monitor. It seems to be able to be remotely controlled from another computer, and also has time limit per day within it. However this got me to thinking about cafe time limit software, and I found this Open Kiosk, which is specifically geared at installation in a cafe environment. It looks like at what time it used to be free, but they are charging for the windows client now. If there is a free cafe time limit alternative that might be good to look at too, but I don't know of one. If you do please comment below, I'd love to know about it.

Browsing the Web

In a perfect world the web wouldn't be littered with inappropriate imagery, and verbiage. It doesn't take long to find bad language on the web. Search for any Justin Bieber (shudder), video on youtube and look in the comments section. You've come to my point. Things that a large population of children find "cool", a large part of the population may make fun of, and do so in vulgar manner. What can you do?

Use a Limited Access Browser

So far I am loving KidZui, and a big part of that is the large pool of sites they already have filtered, and provide simple organized and easy to find for kids. If I didn't have this, I'd have to build this myself, and search out all of this content. KidZui does it for you, and for that I think it's awesome. It also contains learning games, and games that are of age appropriateness. KidZui doesn't provide blacklisting even within it's own environment. But... you can use KidZui as a firefox add-on, and this will allow you to leverage other add-on's within firefox to block access to sites KidZui doesn't block already. The great thing about that, is all you want to do is block any access to "Justin Bieber"... even within KidZui... you can. It's great!

Lockdown the browser you love

Some browsers, specifically firefox provide ways to limit access. One add-on in particular Public Fox Password protects the browser settings, and also gives you the ability to blacklist sites, prevent access to downloads, add-ons, options, bookmarks, history (so they can't delete their history). If you see your kid is going to a site often, and you feel it's inappropriate, you should probably tell your child, and then blacklist it. If you feel they are just spending too much time on that site, then blacklist the site in the "Learning" account, and don't in the other. This way if the kid wants to go to the site, they can use their 1 hour of time usage to go to it, or you can give them temporary access by typing in the password for them for that site. There's also another add-on called ProCon Latte which has a more extensive keyword blocking, and whitelist feature if you want to only give access to a limited amount of sites.

I would also suggest installing Adblock Plus, as someone mentioned to me this will help kids NOT click advertisements on sites that might look like games. This will do one of many things, prevent malware and viruses, and also limit inappropriate advertisements from being shown to your kids.

It's important to note all of this can be combated, if your kid knows the password, so DON'T tell them, or let them see you type it. Kids are smart... a lot smarter than we like to believe sometimes.

Whatever you do don't...

Use Internet Explorer in any form... just please don't, for the love of web developers and designers everywhere.

Block Resolution

If limiting access at the browser is not enough for you, you know kids will find a way, and you want to possibly keep a better eye on activity when/if they are using a more open method or account. This might be something you'd do to an older child's computer. You may not want to put them in as strong of a jail, still give them access, but block access to sites that are really inappropriate, and possibly learn what sites they are visiting, that seem like they could also be inappropriate.

If you're familiar with DNS, the discussion on what it is isn't necessary, but if you aren't it helps to understand how this line of defense works. When you type an address for a website, such as this one, it resolves to an IP address, every server, every computer on the internet has an IP address of some sort. If you're using your internet at home, and connected to a router, most likely your using a private IP address, and your router has a public IP address that your ISP hands out to it over DHCP. Your router gives your computer an IP Address, and DNS servers to lookup name to IP resolutions, so your browser can make the appropriate calls to the proper IP address. There are 2 ways to go about this, one requires you to come to some happy medium of limited access, or extremely limited access for your ENTIRE network, even your own. And the other option gives you the ability to only block access on a single computer.

What to do...

Go to OpenDNS and sign-up for an account. Choose your filtering level, and then decide how you want to setup your level of blocking. If you only want to block the one computer being used, you'll need to manually input the DNS servers to the OpenDNS dns servers, on the computer you'd like to block. If you want to block the entire network, you'll have to input these settings into your router. The last thing you'll want to do is setup the IP update utility on a computer, either the computer the child is using (which I might suggest if they are using the computer outside of your home, like at school), this way OpenDNS knows what name resolutions to block for what network. If you install the software onto the computer being used by the child, you'll also want to manually input the DNS servers as well. If they go to a network at school, or the library, they'll get the DNS servers the DHCP servers on those networks give them.

Adverse Affects

If your child reacts adversely to this, 1 of 2 things will occur. They will withdraw from the technology, and possibly be angry at you, or they will learn how to combat the issues. To combat the first issue, I would make them understand how you use the computer, and how it's important that they understand (at least for me) that it's a tool. I will personally push my kids to use it as a creative tool, make art, make music, make SOMETHING. Trolling the internet for porn, or watching stupid video's in youtube all day, isn't my idea of "productive", but that's my opinion. If the second part happens, there are ways to combat that as well, and if my kid got to the point he/she could evade ACL's within windows, and hack their own computer, I would be buying them a new computer for the good work... because that's my kid! ;)