Discussion on:

Peanut Butter PC: Trying to keep kids safe

Do you lock down your children's access to the family PC in some way? How do you do this? Do your children find ways around it? Are third-party applications like Peanut Butter PC the best way to control your children's PC activities?

While I dont want to be the internet police, there are certain parts of the internet that kids should not visit. I have an Untangle utm box as the gateway of my home network. Being a hardware device they cannot bypass it and there are no open wireless points around my house for them to circumvent that way either, so its be filtered by Untangle or no internet access at all.

I also found iBoss to be interesting. iBoss offers a router you can buy for your home network and it allows you to control what content gets filtered without finicky software on a PC that can be overridden.

http://iboss.com/

Some of the best secured school systems servers, used Novell technology. I guess using an appliance will make up for outdated science. Novell has some catching up to do, unless I've not heard of the latest support projects on it.

If you need full parental control that records everything teens do online (such as Facebook) , as well as filters inappropriate websites, and does linguistic analysis to watch out for dangerous activity -
such as online predators or cyberbullys -
check out McGruff SafeGuard's Parental Control system:
http://www.GoMcgruff.com

You probably remember McGruff The Crime Dog - Take A Bite Out of Crime - from your own childhood.

For FREE iPad/iPhone parental control, check out http://www.GoMcGruff.com/browser

How effective that McGruff solution was. I also always enjoyed the educational spots featuring the "crime dog", on TV.

did you used to lock it down?

I no longer lock it down as the little sucker is now a big sucker and is taller than me, and also 24 years old.

Crikey!! !

I only have windows, on my computer for the kids to play games, all REAL work is done with Linux. Didn't know it was possible to secure a windows based PC.

... because kids tend to have their own gadgets (iPods, smartphones, games machines, laptops, ...) that can all access the Internet anyway, often with their own browsers, completely bypassing the "home PC".

So you really need to lock things down at the router.

But more and more kids are getting data plans with their smartphones these days, meaning they get their own access point to the Internet completely bypassing your home PC and router.

And even if you stop them owning such a device, *and* lock down your router *and* your PC, not only is quite a bit of inappropriate stuff still available even via your filtered connections (none of them are close to perfect) but it's a very good bet that at least one of their friends will have much looser (or no) restrictions at their house, and quite probably most of their friends.

It's a losing battle.

I support the computers at "The Children's Peace Pavillion" www.kidpeace.org. We were using Edmark's Kid Desk on a 1996 vintage WFW 3.11 computer. That machine is being replaced with a Windows 7 touch screen computer, and needs to be locked down to keep the kids from the operating system. We are going to use Peanut Butter PC (PBPC) on them. We are aware of the weaknesses of PBPC and are taking steps to reduce the risk. Windows 7 is locked down as much as we can, and we are making sure that we don't add any programs in PBPC that have a file open dialog box. The kids also will not have access to the keyboard or mouse.