Overwhelmingness of Parental Controls?

re: Overwhelmingness of Parental Controls?

Lawrence Abrams — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:09:16 GMT

I happen to agree, the only section that may be overwhelming for the casual user is the Allow and Block Specific Programs section. For a hard core user it's great, but for a casual parent trying to lock down the computer, I can see the confusion it will bring.

I just finished my tutorial on Setting up Parental controls where I went into detail about every single option. It was a long but interesting experience. The tute can be found here:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial139.html

I noticed a few odd things when playing with the web allow block lists files. One is you do not allow : other than in http://. This makes it impossible to block URLs with non-standard ports like http://www.example.com:81. Another issue is that you can't have an URL with a & in it. I see and understand why when you have a ? for a GET argument in an URL it is stripped so only the specific page is added to the list, but why couldn't that have been done with the ampersands as well? With the way its currently setup it is very hard to do automatic conversion of known bad site lists to the new file format for Parental Controls.

Btw, glad I stumbled on to this site. Very limited resources on parental controls currently.

re: Overwhelmingness of Parental Controls?

David_Bennett — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 08:09:24 GMT

Interesting points, I don't think we allow you to block www.frog.com:81 any differently than www.frog.com. So if you block one, the other is blocked too.

Can you show me some examples of bad site lists? Sounds like something that would be interesting to do, having a program that would convert the known block lists into the parental controls system.

re: Overwhelmingness of Parental Controls?

Lawrence Abrams — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:12:34 GMT

Ahh..that is good to hear about the non-standard ports. Just tested it and your right it does block it as well.

Some examples of bad site lists are:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

http://www.hosts-file.net/downloads.html

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/resource.htm

There are a few others but those are what I feel the best of breed. I have already contacted the creator the MVP Hosts file