My son,has just turned 11 and a month ago I discovered that he's been viewing porn. He's never shown any interest in girls so I was really shocked to discover he'd visited about 30 sites in two days. He wasn't in the least bothered when I spoke to him about it but was angry when I set up parental controls and Norton family online.
I used the computer tonight and I was totally gobsmacked to find that somehow he'd got past my password, set himself up as computer administrator,turned off the parental controls and downloaded mozilla. Apparently Mozilla doesn't support Vistas parental controls so he could watch whatever he wanted.
I've set it up again but does anyone have any better ideas of stopping him getting to adult sites?

Take the computer away?

best advice i can offer is to put the pc in a family area where he can be monitored.

moving on from that take a look at your routers setup as you may be able to block sites direct from there. if that fails you may want to look at something like

http://www.netnanny.com/

best advice is to have the pc somewhere you can keep an eye on him tho

It's worth pointing out that computer security isn't worth a damn if you have someone reasonably resourceful with physical access to the machine. Passwords? A 5-minute job usually.

I'd also suggest putting it in a family room..easier to keep a tab on things.

Any of the sites worth a mention?

Thats just bad!

I'm with everyone else on this one, move the computer into a family room

Bloody kids

Let him?

Unless he is viewing some kinda of hideous donkey porn or something then tbh any male computer savvy kid is going to look at porn at some point.

I agree with defiler, there is no way anyone would have been able to lock me out of a pc, and any reasonably knowledgeable kid will be the same. Far better off with social engineering, keeping the pc in a family room helps but he'll still do it when no-one else is around, when your out or in bed or whatever. Think you are better off talking to him and finding out why he is looking at it, and explaining why you arent comfortable with him doing so.

11 might be a bit young but tbh it was only a couple of years later than that when we were trading discs at school of whatever booby pictures we had managed to grab off of bulletin boards, now porn is only a single google away it really is almost impossible to keep them away with a technical solution.

Can tell you've got no kids


I find the technical solution for things like this is taking the leads away until the problem is resolved and he's sorry (not for being caught) - try using a computer then

Personally I would rather my 11 year old was watching people having sex, than people killing each other. Weirdly though people seem to get more pent up about porn than action/horror films, something I find utterly utterly bizarre.




and you'll just teach him to cover his tracks better.

Death etc is always on the TV! All you need to do is watch the news

Porn sites and Horror films are certified 18 for reason!

That's right, the only sure fire way is to put the computer somewhere visible so you can keep an eye on what's going on, most of the parental controls available are useless...

But failing that the next best thing would be to use the hardware between the computer and the internet. Most people get wireless routers from their internet provider and many of the modern ones have keyword filtering on them. If you have this features you can add 'bad' words to a list and any page including these words will be made unavailable before they reach the computer.

Site filtering is the same idea but using the web address, this can work but is not as effective...

Do you have a router in? and who's it from?

Another option, if you know which sites you want to ban, is to add their addresses to a file on the computer (the hosts file) which will stop any browser or application on the machine being able to find them. It's not difficult to do but wont stop him finding new sites...

No I won't - cos I monitored what he was doing at that age by not allowing internet access apart from on my computer - he only got internet on his computer last year

It's a bit of a difference between the "glamour" pictures that were kicking around when I was at school (and I daresay you too) and that were a valued commodity for playground trading, and the hardcore pornography in a smorgasbord of varieties that's just one web search away. Let's be honest, the stuff that's out there these days will screw up a wee lad's sense of what to expect from girls if he decides to take it too seriously...

I remember the days when you *really* had to look for porn on the internet. That said, I remember using NCSA Mosaic when it couldn't even display pictures. And my usenet feed was filtered so you didn't get alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*...

There's even been talk of setting up a .xxx top-level-domain and shifting all the porn from .com etc etc into it, but that's a massively political nettle that will be rather unpleasant to grab. If it succeeds, though, it'll be possible to just filter out *.xxx. Maybe one day...

Recourceful isn't the word for him. He could get the child lock out of the video player and set it up to watch or record whatever he wanted by the age of three!
11 is too young for hardcore porn. If it was just tits and bums it wouldn't bother me but there's some seriously nasty stuff out there.



We've only got the one computer, Dan uses my one.
I had to shift the computer out of the family room so that I could do my Open Uni stuff in peace.

Surely you could look at some stealth monitoring software, have that setup to take screen shots, aswell as record any key pressed on the keyboard etc...and have it all sent to you're master email account?

Or failing that, setup some sort of password encryption?

Sorry Wilf, wasn't having a pop at you there. TBH tho I think piece of mind might have to overrule OU - either that or ration his time on the PC/ban internet access until he learns that it's not ok when you have told him no

Agree with Finn and Defiler you're going to have trouble stopping him.. at the end of the day whatever controls you put on the current machines if he's savvy enough he could just get a linux live cd or usb stick and boot from that, essentially bypassing anything you can do (unless you put on a very secure bios password (make sure he's not installed a keylogger though if you do that or he'll have captured what the password for that is too!) and lock out booting from any device but the hard drive. Best solution may well be to put the PC back in a family area where he'll be too embarrasesed to look at porn and suggest a future career in IT security??

I think the gist of my reply was largely missed.

Mainly that a technical solution will not solve the problem, and unless you completely lock down the computer (eg no-one can use it without you watching over their shoulder - even putting it in a family room does no good if they can get access when you are in bed or something) then someone who is computer savvy will get around it.

Instead it should be more about talking to the kid and finding out why he went against your wishes. If he doesn't respect you enough to follow your rules he isn't going to have any moral problems with circumventing any lock you might apply