Completely outside the pr0n issue, kinda. Even before I started doing more private stuff on computers I began to get uncomfortable letting someone sit down in front of a computer I was signed into. It took a while to realize, but it’s because any computer I use persistently is a piece of my exo-cortex (great term by the way). The particulars of personalization, what stuff I’ve saved from the ‘net, browser bookmarks, open tabs, automated logins, embarrassing software choices, etc all contribute to a feeling of letting someone poke around inside my mind. Sometimes even shoulder surfing can be intensely unsettling.

I’m pretty glad my parents chose the no-privacy route for anti-pr0n measures, and a filtered ISP (When that was a thing). The alternatives would have been along the lines of the bad ones from the article because we’re a pretty conservative christian type family.

@ rev:

I think that’s the correct way to do this. I haven’t really used untangled, but having a dedicated box for this seems reasonable. And yeah – I wouldn’t be worried as much about p0rn if a lot of sites claiming to be “free” were not riddled with malware, scare scams and various other nasty stuff. A seasoned veteran like me knows the safe ways to find free adult content. A novice just typing in “boobs” into Google can get directed to some truly nasty parts of the internet by accident.

@ Gamberoni:

Haha, yes. When I got my dad a computer and internets I educated him about the various *tube sites and pointed him to TBLOP as a starting point.

As you get older you realise that there is a second part to this. I’m the “family” tech guy, and the worst thing is not children and pr0n, it’s parents and pr0n! It’s an eye-opener in more ways than you know.

i have three young daughters that think its funny to type things like “boobies” into search engines. do i want to protect them from pron? yes. i have windows, linux, apple, and consoles in the house, including tablets, readers, and ipod touches. you can’t protect all the endpoints. for now, i’m using http://www.untangle.com, which provides decent, free content filter software that you just stick between your modem and your router. sure you gotta build another box for your home network, but your kids can’t disable it without rewiring the network closet and you don’t have to install anything on the endpoints. outside the house, sure they can run into inappropriate content, but we talk about it when that happens. it is important to teach them whatever values you want them to share before they become smarter than you. and it’ll happen before you know it.

@ Mihai:

LOL! I think I somehow missed that one when it was first posted. Thanks!

@ Morghan:

Another solution is Farconics Deep Freeze. When you install it, it takes a snapshot of your partition, and then on each reboot restores your system to that state. So regardless of what users do to break it, recovery is usually as easy as rebooting the machine. Naturally it will also delete their files each time they reboot, so it’s usually a good idea to set up network shares for the users that they can use to save personal files.

@ road:

If you are running Tor you will be bypassing local DNS. I believe the DNS resolution is done at the exit node… But yes, the owner of the router could just block tor traffic if they really wanted to.

Less sophisticated proxes work too – you just need a continuous supply, and shuffle them around as the owner of the router blocks them.

I might be latching onto the wrong idea again but…

I personally never handle my computers (or any electronics) with unwashed paws

Amen to that. I do the same with books, no discolored thumbmarks in the middle of the unbound side for me.

I can’t believe nobody remembered this http://xkcd.com/751/ comic

Parents: talk to your kids about popup blockers. Also, at some point, sex. But crucial fundamentals first!

The only thing that would really work is something like OpenDNS. As long as you control the router, you control all the traffic. That said, it would be a pain in the ass to change your DNS server every time you want to watch a little pr0n yourself ;)

I once fixed a guys computer who insisted that I put tags on all of the cables matching stickers next to every port, even after I showed him that the only two cables that would even fit in the wrong slot were the mouse and keyboard, on top of that he was a hoverer. *shudders* There’s a reason I follow The Oatmeal’s advice and pretend to know nothing about computers, shame people don’t buy it when they see Debian booting up.

As for pr0n protection, my kid is four so she gets a whitelist, at some point down the road I may implement some form of gateway logging but my preference lies with putting the computer up in the living room so there’s no hiding what you’re doing. After all, I have a phone, tablet, and laptop for private porn viewing. Also, no smartphones for the wee one until they can buy it and pay their own contract, they get a burner with a card every month.

At mom’s house there’s a crappy old desktop set up in the living room, planning to do the same here if I ever see one used that’s actually worth picking up. Boot it from a flash drive so any end user stupidity does no damage that can’t be undone with a simple reset. If I get another gaming PC it will definitely NOT be something that I let kids browse the net on, neither will my work computer, there will be not just a seperate browser but a whole different computer for crap like Facebook. Another big reason to keep the work PC out of the hands of children, it is my Windows box used for microcentric crap I need IE and MS Office for, and while I know they’ve gotten better lately I still don’t trust if for anything outside of my domain or off the VPN.