Discussion on:

The basics of using a proxy server for privacy and security

Hopefully someone can provide some insight...

I have young teenagers who just love to surf the u-tube world from their iPod touch / Kindles / iPhones and, to the best of my knowledge, there are NO parental control type programs available for these devices due, in part, to Apple's 'every application lives in it's own world' policy.

I've considered using some sort of proxy server to act as a 'gateway' to the web with some application to restrict access to objectionalble / inappropriate web content for these devices - i.e., parental controls.

Am I mis-understanding what a proxy server is / does? If not, I would certianly appreciate any input as to how to accomplish this. Teenage boys can find a lot of content through sites like u-tube, whether intentionally or not, that puberty prevents them from bypassing on their own.

if they are using the wireless at your home, you can easily block sites or even use a different DNS server to block certain sites. the easiest is OpenDNS, but plenty of others out there. problem is if they use the cell on their iphone. if they use the cell you probably have to do something through the cell provider

Try reposting this in the 'Q&A' forum. The 'Discussion' forum is for matters of general discussion, not specific problems in search of a solution. The 'Water Cooler' is for non-technical discussions. You can submit a question to 'Q&A' here:

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There are TR members who specifically seek out problems in need of a solution. Although there is some overlap between the forums, you'll find more of those members in 'Q&A' than in 'Discussions' or 'Water Cooler'.

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A device requests a page from the proxy, the proxy decides whether it has to fetch it, or can return it from the cache. So it has know what it has. Blocking is a simple step after that. Most proxy servers come with various tools for doing that.

Unless you are planning on banning them by url, no more you tube ever boys.. Not to mention telling a say the video for a modern dance tune and a porn film apart would beyond any automatic blocking system I've ever heard of...

Course stopping boys being boys is a different thing all together, perhaps you could start with something more achievable like cold fusion, or curing world hunger?

Lots of school system IT admins have struggled with increasingly sophisticated students using proxies to get around their own content-blocking filters. YouTube is full of tutorial videos made by high school students and aimed at other high-school students telling how to bypass the content-filtering on their library PCs.

Suddenly, being in the Computer Club is a social advantage in high school. We all grew up in the wrong time.

Offices are seeing this start to happen more frequently too.

Fortunately they are not anywhere near that level yet. Once they get to college (i.e., out of the house on their own), then they will be just that, on their own.

There are plenty of parental control applications, but none (that I have found) that will work on these devices. I am looking for something that will be between their iPods and Kindles, and the internet, and was hoping that a proxy server could be just that device, passing all network traffic through it and filtering out / blocking what I can.

I use Hamachi to connect to a home server that's also running Hamachi and Privoxy. I've had good luck with this setup, after I got over having to punch a hole through the server's firewall to allow the proxy connections in. This helps with coffeeshop and campus connections quite a bit. I don't proxy to torrent or do anything like that; I really just want people to keep their mitts off my traffic.