Making the Internet safer for your family

Note: The original title of this post was “In which Lingamish searches for porn, girls and xxx.”

Our family is slowly habituating to the US and its oddities. We continue to be shocked and amazed by the variety in the grocery stores. If only we could transport the smallest convenience store in the most podunk US town to our village in Africa we would feel rich beyond measure.

We haven’t figured out what to do with TV. I love football and HGTV. The Extreme Foods show with Andrew Whatsisname was fun for a while but then it started reminding me too much of life in Africa. Speaking of eating, I’ve gained a respectable 20 pounds since arriving in the US four months ago. I’ve never had a love handle before and am quite proud of it (No pictures, sorry).

Living in Africa we never needed things like parental controls and SPAM blockers because our Internet was so slow and so seldom connected that it was literally impossible for anything malicious or prurient to get on to our computers.

All that’s changed now. We have four laptops in the house. High-speed wireless. And someone in every room accessing one thing or another on the Internet.

So the question comes up: What can we do to protect little eyes? And big eyes as well! At the same time I discovered that an acquaintance was allowing their family to browse the web without any kind of parental controls. I promised to look into it and let me tell you it is complicated. There are controls you can put on your computer. There are controls for your browser. There are accountability systems that send lists of your URLs visited to a chosen “accountability partner.” There are complete software packages that will actually strip out naughty words and replace them with stars.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this is a scary world we live in. When I was a kid the only way I could see porn was because one of my friends had discovered his Dad’s stash of dirty magazines. Nowadays any kid that types “girl,” “bikini” or “sex” into his web browser is instantly sucked into a cesspool of filth. Let me talk frankly with you. Boys are very curious about these things. Way beyond that. The hormones and the physical drives that kick in during adolescence are insane. So I don’t think you’re going to stop boys from thinking about such things. But I do think you can hopefully limit the fuel for their fantasizing to bra ads in the newspaper rather than hard core porn sites on the web.

So I went in search of something to stem the tide of junk on our computers so that hopefully our kids could use the Internet without danger.

Kids up to age 12

The solution I ended up with for my kids was Glubble. This is a Firefox add-on that essentially hijacks your FireFox browser and turns it into a kid-friendly browser that only allows kids to visit pre-approved sites. If they try to visit a site that hasn’t been approved by the Glubble folks, it is blocked but they can send a request to their parent or guardian requesting permission to view it.

My kids have had a blast with this. It has thousands of sites with games and silly games and lots of games and… games… you get the picture.

Coupled with this I set up the Content Advisor in Windows to only accept rated sites. This essentially locks down Internet Explorer with a password that the parent supplies so they can only use FireFox.

Teens and Adults

I really struggled to find something that would work for teens and adults. There are solutions for Windows or Apple. And Internet Explorer or FireFox. There are many commercial options like Covenant Eyes. But I wanted something free. And simple.

I was looking for something that did the following:

1. Blocks known objectionable content
2. Keeps a log of sites visited on that computer
3. Isn’t browser or OS dependent

I was completely stumped until I turned to the homeschoolers’ forum. My wife has access to the Sonlight Forum and it is full of homeschool moms manically trading messages about the preferred history book for Core 3 and what to do about a child who refuses to do handwriting, etc. I searched for “internet filter” and came upon a long thread mentioning many of the programs I had already tried as well as something called K9 Web Protection.

Turns out K9 is terrific. It’s free. You install it on the computer and it keeps track of sites visited and also blocks objectionable content.

Once I found this I sat down with my wife and put it to the test. We searched for “porn.” We searched for “girls” and “xxx.” In some cases Google simply blocked these because of the SafeSearch settings we had selected for Google. But it would still bring up results like this:

Maxim Magazine’s Girls of Maxim section featuring hot girls and the most beautiful women.

If you tried to click on it (Hilary clicked while I averted my gaze) it simply brought up a message saying, “K9 Web Protection Alert: Category Blocked.” Then this attempted visit was logged in a place that only the administrator could access with a password.

We ended up installing it on all our computers and are trying it out. It is also available in beta for the Mac. About the only thing that we changed was to have K9 block Google Images and always accept lingamish.com.

There isn’t really a way to protect your children (or husband as the case may be) from looking at salacious content on the Internet. Sometimes you will stumble on things but I think a system like K9 will drastically reduce the “stumbling blocks.” For example, Hilary and I searched for “bikini” and Google returned a result for Flickr showing girls posing in bikinis. But without K9, such a search would have been one click away from hard core porn.

General comments

I really think that it’s important to try to be open about this stuff and include the people we’re trying to “police” in the process. So I’ve been explaining to our young kids why we’re putting controls on the computer (without giving too many details). In the case of our friends with the teens I encouraged them to include the teens in setting up the software and controls on their computers and then Mom or Dad can change the password later and perhaps meet with the kids once a week to talk about “results” or whenever suspicious activity is taking place.

I’m very happy about Glubble as a way of creating a safe way for my small kids to explore the Internet. When they get older they’ll probably want less restriction and a product like K9 might help them to explore without being led astray.

Links:

• Glubble (A Firefox Add-On)
• K9 Web Protection

What about you? What are you doing to protect your kids and yourself from the unseemly side of the Internet?

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