Third-Party Products

Many commercial software packages are available to help you control your child's access to the Internet. It's up to you to decide how valuable they are and how much they invade your child's privacy. These programs can do everything from monitor access to block access. Keep in mind, however, that these programs are by no means comprehensive or perfect in blocking all traffic you think is dangerous. Another problem with these programs is that they might block legitimate access to sites such as medical sites. Filtering rules based on content or key words is subjective. The software might block something that you consider to be allowable for your child to watch. It all boils down to your educating your children on what is appropriate.

Several third-party programs include the following:

We will walk though Net Nanny in detail to describe some of the functionality available in these types of programs. The functionality between these programs might vary a bit, but the basic premise is that they attempt to block access to questionable material. The main functions that are monitored and blocked by these programs include the following:

  • Web surfing

  • Chat rooms

  • Newsgroups

  • Personal information dissemination

The main methods of filtering use keyword searches of Web site content and domain name for questionable keywords. If they find these keywords, they block the Web site from being viewed. Some programs have human intervention in the selection process. The filtering company puts together a list of sites that they add to their software to block. This is a continuous process because the Internet is always changing and new sites are always being added. You also have the ability to add sites to the list of blocked sites, but as you can imagine, for every site you find that you think should be blocked, there are probably 100 others that you and the software do not know about.

Net Nanny

Net Nanny is one of the more popular tools for monitoring what your kids do on the Internet. It has a broad range of features, which include filtering harmful Web sites, restricting access to the Internet, monitoring activity, and safeguarding personal information. You install it on the machine you want to protect and give each user an account. Each account can have different levels of restrictions and access. Net Nanny can control Web sites, chat rooms, and newsgroups. The ability to control every site your child visits can be a blessing and a curse. You will see which sites your child visits, but this requires a lot of attention and inspection on your part, which can be time-consuming and even annoying. Net Nanny has a feature to keep personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and credit card numbers from being sent out from your computer. Logs of all activity can be viewed to see what your child has actually done online.

To configure and operate Net Nanny, you can use the following steps:

1.
After installing Net Nanny and rebooting, you have to set up users in Net Nanny for it to perform any type of filtering. On each machine to which you give your children access, you need a program to perform filtering. You give the administrator a password and then set up users in Net Nanny, up to 12. You can set these options under the User Settings tab. In Figure 15.15, we are setting up a user called Bobby. Bobby can set up his password, or we can set it for him. Then we use the Add button to enable him.

Figure 15.15. User creation.


2.
The filters are set through System Settings, List Violations, as shown in Figure 15.16. For each function, Web Sites, Words and Phrases, Newsgroups, and Chat, you can set up the program to show a warning message, block access, and shut down the program.

Figure 15.16. Setting up the filters in Net Nanny.


3.
You can update the Net Nanny list of sites automatically through several different options under System Settings, NN List Update, as shown in Figure 15.17.

Figure 15.17. Update the list of sites to block.


4.
You can set up logging to log everything that is violated in the activity log and set up the chat log separately by selecting System Settings, Logs. Logging all activity and all chat activity is probably a waste of time. Logging just the violations is a better idea, as shown in Figure 15.18.

Figure 15.18. Set up logging of violations.


5.
Blocking Web sites is the major task of Net Nanny and the other monitoring programs. The list of blocked sites can be quite extensive. In Net Nanny, you can set up the sites that are inherent to Net Nanny as well as add your own sites that you want to block, as shown in Figure 15.19, by selecting System Settings, Web Sites. In addition, you can exclude sites from the blocking program if you feel they are safe. When you update the list of sites, you will have to come back and check what changes have been made, which sites you might want to allow, or which additional sites you want to block.

Figure 15.19. Set up Web sites that you want to block or allow.


6.
The next major filter option that you can use is blocking sites based on words and phrases. A built-in list is available that you can modify through System Settings, Words and Phrases, as shown in Figure 15.20. This list is quite extensive. You can add or delete words. If you have ever tried to perform a Web search, you know how difficult it is to find the things that match your search criteria. This same problem exists with blocking based on words and phrases. These programs will miss certain sites and block some legitimate ones.

Figure 15.20. Setting up blocking by words and phrases.


7.
You can block newsgroups through System Settings, Newsgroups, as shown in Figure 15.21. As with Web sites, many questionable newsgroups exist that you might want to block, but Net Nanny does not provide a list by default. You have to go out and find the groups you want to block and add them to the program.

Figure 15.21. Set up newsgroup blocking.


8.
Chat rooms can also be monitored and blocked using Net Nanny. The same problem exists with blocking chat rooms as exists with Web sites and newsgroups, but to a greater degree. Chat rooms can exist as Internet relay chat (IRC) channels, which is what Net Nanny blocks, but they can also exist within Web sites or even as standalone programs such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger. These all allow chat and use different ports; you should know that they are not checked thoroughly by Net Nanny or any of the other monitoring programs in granular detail. Figure 15.22 shows the chat restrictions you can set. Like the newsgroups, you have to come up with the list of chats to block on your own. Literally thousands of chat rooms exist on IRC alone.

Figure 15.22. Setting up chat blocking.


9.
A nice feature of the Net Nanny is the ability to stop personal information from being sent out from your system. You can do this by selecting System Settings, Personal Information, as shown in Figure 15.23. If you store all your sensitive information in one place—such as name, address, and credit card information—and your security becomes compromised, an attacker can get all your information from one place.

Figure 15.23. Controlling personal information from leaving your system.


10.
The last significant feature of Net Nanny is the ability to use several rating systems that sites voluntarily follow to rate their sites. You can set the rating options by selecting System Settings, Rating Systems, as shown in Figure 15.24. The problem is that Net Nanny uses two rating systems, and Web sites don't really use either of them yet. It's pretty useless to go by the ratings because not very many sites use RASCi or SafeSurf ratings. Until some rating system becomes a standard or is enforced through laws, these systems will not do you much good.

Figure 15.24. Selecting a rating system to use.


11.
When you have completed your settings selection, you can apply the rules to each user, as shown in Figure 15.25. Select System Settings, Rating Systems.

Figure 15.25. Applying settings to each user.


When you have Net Nanny in place, it begins blocking based on whatever rules you set up for each user. In the case of the user Bobby that we set up, trying to surf a Web site looking for “porn” blocked access and displayed the error message shown in Figure 15.26.

Figure 15.26. Warning message when a filter is activated.


You can check the log messages to see what kinds of violations occurred by selecting System Settings, Logs, as shown in Figure 15.27. In this figure, we see three violations by the user Bobby.

Figure 15.27. Check the log for violations.


What do all these security settings mean for your child's protection? Not much really. So many things cannot be blocked by these types of filter programs that you might as well not have them. For simple blocking schemes for young children, these types of programs do provide some value. For your older children, however, many of whom know more about the Internet and navigating through different programs and functionality than you do, these programs will just be a challenge to overcome.

If it is difficult to monitor and block your child's access to Internet resources, what do you do? Our answer is education. Without teaching them the proper usage of the Internet and technology, you are leaving them open to the evil influences that they will encounter in cyberspace. The Internet has both good and bad qualities; it's your job to educate your children in how to properly navigate cyberspace securely.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset