Parental Controls vs. proxies

[Arthur Dent]

Hello all...

I am a little bewildered at the moment reagarding Vista's parental controls,
and am curious how other people have handled this.
I set up PC on my girlfriend's computer last weekend, to keep her
god-daughter off of i.e., myspace.com.
Then her god-daughter actually admitted to getting around her school's
filters.

So i asked a few friends about this (i am more a software guy, networking
magic is not my purview).
With some pointers from them, all of two emails' worth of effort, i was
amaZED how easy it was to get around the parental controls.

type in www.ninjaproxy.com, enter in www.myspace.com, and BAM! you're past
the filters. This was a little shocking.
in 20 minutes, i'd bypassed the security. Now, i REalize that ANY security
and filters can be bypassed with enough determination and effort.
But bypassing Vista's was ---INSANELY--- easy.

Now this wouldn't be so bad, if in the allow/block lists, you could use
wildcards... for example to block :
http://*.*prox*.*
but you cant even do that. :-\ .

How are other people dealing with this? Sure, i could block ninjaproxy.com,
but i'm sure there must be dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of similar
sites to use.

Looking forward to hear other's opinions/approaches.
Thanks!
- Arthur Dent.

 

[Alun Harford]

Hello all...

I am a little bewildered at the moment reagarding Vista's parental
controls, and am curious how other people have handled this.
I set up PC on my girlfriend's computer last weekend, to keep her
god-daughter off of i.e., myspace.com.
Then her god-daughter actually admitted to getting around her school's
filters.

So i asked a few friends about this (i am more a software guy,
networking magic is not my purview).
With some pointers from them, all of two emails' worth of effort, i was
amaZED how easy it was to get around the parental controls.

type in www.ninjaproxy.com, enter in www.myspace.com, and BAM! you're
past the filters. This was a little shocking.
in 20 minutes, i'd bypassed the security. Now, i REalize that ANY
security and filters can be bypassed with enough determination and effort.
But bypassing Vista's was ---INSANELY--- easy.

Now this wouldn't be so bad, if in the allow/block lists, you could use
wildcards... for example to block :
http://*.*prox*.*
but you cant even do that. :-\ .

How are other people dealing with this? Sure, i could block
ninjaproxy.com, but i'm sure there must be dozens and dozens, if not
hundreds of similar sites to use.

Looking forward to hear other's opinions/approaches.

There's dozens of ways to get around such filters.

Against an even moderately technically sophisticated adversary, such
"security" doesn't stand a chance.

Fortunately, Vista logs sites that the user goes to, and the logging is
much harder to break, so I suggest you use that instead.

Alun Harford

 

[Robert Moir]

How are other people dealing with this? Sure, i could block
ninjaproxy.com, but i'm sure there must be dozens and dozens, if not
hundreds of similar sites to use.

Looking forward to hear other's opinions/approaches.

Even with very expensive sophisticated filtering packages, you can't
completely eliminate all the avenues. What is the reason the limits are
being set? To keep someone off a site they want to be on? Heck a mobile
phone can surf the web these days bypassing _whatever_ you do to the
computers in the house.

You need to set and agree limits on what is and is not acceptable, and use
"parental supervision". Software might be able to assist with both of these
but it isn't a solution in itself and I'd be very wary of anyone who
suggested it was.