Ben Shephard

At the weekend I brought Janine’s computer home to rebuild it and beef it up a bit. It’s a HP Pavilion and it’s pretty basic. 256MB RAM 2.53 GHz Celleron processor with on board video. I’ve had a scavenge through some of my kit and found a reasonable Nvidia graphics card and an extra 512 MB RAM to go in it. I decided rather than formatting the 40GB HDD that was in there already I’d replace it with a 60GB I had laying around. It’s not much by today’s standards but it’s a little more space for music and pictures and I could keep all the old HDD intact in case anything got missed in the rebuild.

I’ve had to bear in mind that this is a family PC and it’s going to be used by two young lads. Now since I used to be a young lad (a long time ago now but I was) I know the kind of things they get up to and the Internet is full of things that as a parent you might not want your kids to see. When I was growing up the Internet was still in it’s infancy and the idea of locking down what your kids can access was a pretty new idea then. I used to talk to friends back then who had their connection filtered by the likes of Net Nanny amongst others. I remember when I was a teenager I was chatting to an American lass on AOL when I used a very mild swear word and all of a sudden she signed off. I figured she’d had to go and never thought no more about it until a week later when I spoke to her again and she said the word I used triggered the parental control software her parents had installed to block her Internet access for a week. As you can imagine she never spoke to me again for fear I might get her kicked off the Internet again. This is a little extreme in my view but it’s impossible to protect against every thing that’s out there.

I wanted to protect prying eyes from some of the darker corners of the Internet because I know what’s out there and some of it is pretty disturbing even as an adult and it’s getting worse year on year. I had a look on wikipedia to see what the current state was when it comes to parental control software. I’m rebuilding the machine as a Windows machine as Janine is into games and the kids have a good few Windows based educational games that there probably going to want to play. It seems there isn’t a deal of choice when it comes to free and open source software. There are a couple of commercial offerings but I like to avoid that where ever possible. I decided perhaps I could look beyond the full fat parental control app and have a look to see if there were any good plug-ins for FireFox that would do a reasonably good job.

Thats when I came across ProCon Latte. It’s a FireFox plug-in that filters pages based on key words or specific sites. It’s possible to password protect it so it can’t be disabled or removed and the default list is pretty good but you can also add to this yourself. There is also a white list to allow any sites that it blocks that are harmless but may contain a word that triggers the filter or you can lock down access to a few specific sites by blocking all traffic except for the contents of the white list. I’m used to web content filtering from work where we use a Squid proxy server which is very good but over kill for one machine. I’ve set up Windows with a separate account for each user and installed ProCon Latte for the kids accounts so that should filter out most of the nasty stuff the web has to offer. As I said before it’s impossible to protect from everything out there on the net just as it is in the real world. We all have occasions where people use inappropriate language or other things out of your control but it’s important to make sure kids know what’s right and wrong when those moments occur.

I’d highly recommend FireFox and ProCon Latte on any machine that would be used by kids. It might not be the strictest solution out there but it does a really good job and it’s £0 cost

Ben

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