Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Protecting your family in an ever-increasingly connected world

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, to get to wonderland Alice had to dirty her dress, scuff up her shoes, and slide down mud holes. She got there but it was difficult and risky. Alice was brazen. In Carroll’s later poem, “Through the Looking Glass”, the protagonist gets to wonderland by merely walking through the looking glass. It doesn’t seem to cost anything. Wonderland is just a step away, being somehow eerily inside her own home. The world many of us grew up in was full of temptations but often times it was risky; it was hard. Today our kids can walk down any back alley in the world and it’s all just a step away; a click away. The good news is that there is plenty of good solutions for keeping the back alleys where they belong.

Communication
First the obvious. Clearly communicate family expectations to your kids. Set hours of use, what’s appropriate and what’s not, consequences, etc. One idea is to have a family meeting with the outcome being a written contract which everyone in the family signs. Post it in view of computers in the home as a reminder of the commitment everyone has made to God and to each other.

Location, Location, Location

Any computers in the home need to be in public, trafficed areas. If students need to type a paper and they need a quiet place to work, send them to another room and leave a door open. Again, whatever the expectations are for where Internet surfing is permissible, make sure they are clearly communicated up front.

Third-party (free) Monitoring and Blocking tools

Blocking inappropriate web sites has gotten much easier in the past couple years. Thankfully some web filtering companies who sell very high-end devices to corporations have started making their solutions freely available for home-use. Of all the solutions I’ve tried, “K9 Web Protection” from Blue Coat Systems is the all-around winner. It’s free and works for the PC and the Mac [http://k9webprotection.com] as well as iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads [http://www1.k9webprotection.com/getk9/k9-web-protection-browser - follow the instructions]. Once you've installed the software and told it what to block, your web browser checks with K9’s filtering servers every time you browse to a web page and either allows it or doesn't. You can customize your setup to block the categorizes of sites you want blocked and unblock those that are permissible for your family. There is also reporting, parental alerts, automatic internet shutdown after so many blocked attempts within the same period of time, and more. You can visit their web site for installation/signup procedures. One added benefit to this solution is that if it’s a laptop, it’s installed on that laptop regardless where the laptop travels: onto the neighbor’s unsecured wireless network, over to a friend’s house, etc.

Online Toasters?

If toasters aren’t internet-accessible yet, I’m sure they will be soon. In the last 5 years, more and more electronics have become “Internet accessible”. From TVs, Blu-ray players, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, iPod Touch, to handheld gaming devices such as Nintendo DSi and Playstation PSP, “internet-accessible” is everywhere. Just search for “internet-enabled” and you’ll find internet-enabled cat feeders, pianos, and more. The toaster is just around the corner.

The challenge with this new reality is that the K9 Web Protections of the world don’t have filtering software for a Nintendo DSi, Wii, and blueray player (only PCs, Macs, and Apple mobile devices). These devices will taut “parent controls” often but rarely does that mean much other than the parents ability to simply shutoff online capability altogether (something I recommend for devices that don’t specifically need it). There is one very cool solution that will protect all these devices with a fairly descent, although not perfect, amount of accuracy. The solution is elegant and again, free! It provides decent protection for anything using your home Internet connection, all in one single swoop. The solution is called: “OpenDNS”.

OpenDNS [http://www.opendns.com/familyshield/]

First a little Internet background. When you ask the Internet for a web page [http://www.google.com for example], the Internet first decides what the Internet address is of that particular site. It’s kind of like trying to reach me by phone but only knowing my name. You first have to find my phone number by looking up my name in your phonebook. On the Internet, this lookup service are called “domain name service” (or DNS). Your home’s router/modem is given 2 DNS servers by your Internet provider to give it the ability to lookup Internet addresses behind the scenes. AT&T, Comcast, etc all provide you with 2 of their own DNS servers. Following our phonebook analogy, what if your phonebook was nice enough to only include the phone numbers of “nice” people and didn’t include look-up information for anyone else? That’s OpenDNS. If your computer told OpenDNS to find an inappropriate website (because your son or daughter requested such a site) its look-up system knows that web site contains inappropriate material so it just wouldn’t give your computer the correct Internet address. It just won’t work. You have to create an account on OpenDNS’s system in order to tell it what categories of content you want blocked otherwise, unconfigured, it merely blocks pornographic sites (which may fit your needs just fine). In addition to creating an account on their web site (which is optional) the other step (this is isn’t optional) to implement OpenDNS is to either A) purchase an OpenDNS-enabled Internet router or to B) login to your existing router and tell it to use OpenDNSs’ DNS servers instead of the 2 DNS servers you are already using. This option “B” is obviously a bit more technical but doesn’t require any new hardware purchase. It involves typing in OpenDNSs’ 2 DNS servers which are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. For more details about OpenDNS, please refer to the link above.

NOTE: Unfortunately, “AT&T U-Verse” customers can’t easily utilize OpenDNS (“AT&T DSL” customers won’t have a problem). There are some very advanced configuration options available to make it work (disabling wireless on the AT&T modem and daisy-chaining another wireless router off of the AT&T device) but for the most part AT&T U-Verse customers will only be able to install K9 Web Protection everywhere and will have to forego the OpenDNS additional layer of protection. AT&T U-Verse reports to have its own parental controls that might be acceptable for you. Click here for instructions on configuring those.


You could consider only using OpenDNS and not installing 3rd party monitoring solutions like K9 Web Protection but I would not recommend it unless all you are looking for is “accident insurance” (protection from you or a child in your home accidentally finding inappropriate material). For the determined one, there are ways around OpenDNS that can be tricky, but possible. I, for one, like the accountability of having K9 Web Protection available. One quick example why K9 Web Protection is so nice is if your neighbor has an open wireless network connection. In that scenario, if your home network blocks inappropriate materials, your child will still be able to hop over onto your neighbors network and will be unrestricted at that point.

Guidelines to follow:
  • Recommended Content filter/monitor for PCs and Macs: http://k9webprotection.com
  • Recommended Content filter/monitor for everything using your home Internet connection: http://www.opendns.com/familyshield
  • Recommended Content filter for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches: http://www1.k9webprotection.com/getk9/k9-web-protection-browser
  • When specifying a password when installing parental control software of any kind allow one person in the home to know the first half of the password and you know the other half. That way the entire family has accountability.
  • If your computer is owned and managed by your company, check with your company’s technical support before installing any content filtering software on their computer. Effective content filtering software is so tamper-proof that it can be difficult for your company to effectively manage your system. Furthermore, your company likely already has content filtering and monitoring software installed on their computers, whether you are aware of it or not. Installing the free K9 Web Protection on a system owned by a business should never be done (doing so breaks Bluecoat’s software’s license agreement and puts your company at risk).
  • Do not allow a child unsupervised usage of your company’s computer regardless whether you think it has an Internet connection or not. Many companies have a zero-tolorance policy when it comes to leaving traces of inappropriate Internet content on company-owned devices.
  • Parental controls bundled with an Internet provider are tied to that provider’s connection; this shouldn’t be considered “safe” because if your computer has wireless capability, the neighbor’s Internet provider can often times be used as easily as your “protected” Internet provider. Every computer can have wireless capability if it has a USB port (wireless modems are very cheap and very portable).
  • Keep in mind that when kids bring their DSi’s or PSP’s into other peoples’ homes, they are bringing with them a doorway into the Internet so lock down those devices using parental controls beforehand or check ahead of time whether the home they are going to has solutions like OpenDNS in place already (show those families how if they don’t!).
  • Have a family meeting about Internet usage (allowed times, unacceptable sites, which places around the house are allowed for Internet surfing, about being honest when mistakes are made) and create a subsequent policy that the entire family is aware of (post it on the family computer).
  • Put on your geek hat, open a user manual or two, and learn how to access your Internet router’s log of who browsed to what site when and communicate to your family that you will be checking those logs periodically. You wouldn’t let your kids wonder around a huge city without knowing where they are going and the expectation shouldn’t be any different when “wondering” around the web. Many internet routers have the capability to email those logs to you on a daily or weekly basis.
  • An alternative to reading your Internet router logs is to utillize the reporting features of both OpenDNS and K9 Web Protection. Let’s face it: Even the most clever of automated solutions can be overcome by a bored, hormone-raging teenager with enough time on his hands. But knowing that every wall they hit in trying to overcome the filter will get reported to their parents/grandparents/girlfirend's parents/etc the less likely they are to try and bypass the filtering solution in the first place.
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