Wisdom

You don’t have to be as tech savvy as your kids.

You don’t.

In fact, if you try to chase technology as the best way to protect your kids in the online age, you’ll actually end up making a lot of mistakes.

Instead of focusing on technology, focus on truth.

Focus on building a set of consistent truths in your house that apply whether your kids are offline or online. Give them the truths that govern the way your home functions instead of trying to stay on top of the next technology and the next technology and the next technology.

~ Full Article from John Acuff

Netflix

We love Netflix.

Lately the mokikids have been enjoying some great kids programming there. This means that our recommendation queue has been filled with loads of kids titles.

So when an Anime title came up that I did not recognize, I decided to screen it. I'm very happy that I screened it before showing the family. This was porn. Plain and simple. I'm shocked that Netflix would have recommended it, but they did. The majority of our viewing lately has been preschool, and in all the years we have had Netflix, there may have been one R movie we received.

This caused me to look into Netflix's parental controls, and I must say I am sorely disappointed. There are three major problems.

Too Simple
Ratings are very complex. TV has adopted ratings (TV-14, TV-Y7, TV-PG, etc) and movies have long had their own set of ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.). The two do not mix. Other media has it's own ratings as well: music is either clean or explicit, Video games have their own system, etc. Netflix has decided to only implement one - You choose a movie rating.

The good news is that the offensive show was blocked by my PG-13 choice even though it used the TV rating system.


No override
Currently there is no way to temporarily override this setting. It's all or nothing. If mom and dad want to watch a late night flick which happens to be over the rating limit, the parental controls must be turned off. This means you have to remember to turn it back on.

Which leads to the third problem:

Slow propagation

When my wife and I want to watch that movie late at night, we usually use the Netflix-ready BluRay player in the living room. However, according to Netflix, the change could take up to eight hours to make it to the Wii/BluRay/PlayStation/iPad/Netflix-ready device of choice.
You have one setting, for everyone. It must be turned on and off from the web, and does not immediately propagate to your Netflix ready devices. This makes it impossible to set the ratings and then turn them off temporarily.

Some other notes:
You can still see the offensive artwork and descriptions of higher-rated programs, but this is true in the video store as well.

The current new season of Phineas and Ferb is now streaming on Netflix. This has nothing to do with parental controls, but we are very excited about it.

Google Docs and iOS

We here at Safernets have come to rely on Google Docs as a family. It is an amazing tool for collaboration. If you are unfamiliar with Google Docs, it is similar to Microsoft Office. There is a spreadsheet program and a word processor. Both are much simpler than MS Office, and both are web-based programs.

These programs are what my professors at Texas A&M kept telling us the web would be someday. It took 15 years, but we are finally there: complete group collaboration on web-based software.

And now, these programs also work reliably well on iOS and Androids.

For example: We have a family grocery list document in Google Docs. It is shared between all members of the family. When we run out of ketchup, my son can whip out an iPhone and quickly add ketchup to the family grocery list. When the shopping happens, we have a current and complete list that we can view and even edit on the go.

If you spend any time using Google Docs on your iPhone, I highly recommend the $1 app called G-Whizz (website). This app is far better than the built-in web browser or even than the google mobile app for google applications.

Lego Universe

Thanks to a very generous grandparent, the MokiKids have been enjoying the new MMO Lego Universe for a few weeks now.

Here are some notes that parents might want to know, especially parents of multiple kids.

Account information

The disc which comes with Lego Universe has a code that will unlock exactly one account. The disc can be installed on multiple computers. However, a Lego Universe account can only be logged in to one computer at a time.

Each account has four customizable minifigs (characters). In theory you can have four different kids play on one account. However, they can only play one at a time.

If you want to have two players play at the same time, it will require a second purchase of the Lego Universe game and a second account. Tip: Lego Shop@Home currently has this disc for only $10. Sadly, we have not found a discount for the subscription service

Each disc comes with a 30-day free trial.

Parental Controls

As with most software, it's best to use your parent's admin account to install the software for the first time. Also, make sure you run the program for the first time from the parent's admin account. It has to download a ton of patches and takes quite a while.

If you are blocking all websites except for a list of allowable sites, you will need to add a few servers to the kids' allowed website list:
www.lego.com
universe.lego.com
www.legouniverse.com
cache.legouniverse.com

Also note: it requires 10G of space. Make room.

What ages need parental controls?

(* data taken from personal observation)

iPhone browsing via McAfee

We here at Safernets have taken a giant step into the void.

My eldest has an iPhone.

This is a challenge on many, many levels. The first being location. The number one rule in keeping your internet safe is to have a public location where the computers are located. The lack of privacy can in itself help to police the content coming into your home. However, the ability to have the entire internet in your pocket changes this dynamic completely. Rules must be set. My wife and I are still working on these rules.

The second, more technical challenge, is how to regulate the parental controls on the iPhone (or iPod Touch).

iOS has some rudimentary controls built in. Basically, you can turn off some things about the device.



This allows the parent to make sure YouTube and Safari are not used. Once "Install Apps" is turned off, the device becomes very locked down. However, it also becomes much less useful.

The reason my children want an iOS device is to use the internet and apps. Enter the world of secondary browsers. A number of developers have stepped up to fill this void - creating a replacement for Safari that will allow some measure of parental controls. Some are whitelists, some are blacklists.


Recently, McAfee released their version of an iPhone internet browser called McAfee Family Protection [iTunes link]. At $19.99 one would expect this to be a suitable and usable option.

The good part, is that a complete history of the device's web browsing history is kept online for parents to look at. A nice bonus is that the location of the phone is stored with each page access. This is a bit of an overkill, and may cause some unnecessary battery drain. But it is nice. Google searches are also defaulted to Google's safe search.

As for the software itself, it is close to unusable. There is no back button. Web browsing with no back button. This is such a crippling limitation that it is hard to move past it.

There are several other major bugs. Most of the time, when I googled for information - part of the google results would stay in front of the screen. I had to restart the app to clear it.

I have been hoping some of these things would be cleared up in a future release, but it has been months. If any of my readers want to suggest another solution, I'm all ears.

Linux

I have been remiss. The truth is, I don't know any parents with Linux. I apologize, because I know you are out there. And I know you are going to have to deal with the same kind of issues. Today, I was pointed to this article from TechRadar.com detailing the pros and cons of six different parental control solutions for the Linux platform. The bottom line is that the author prefers the free tool Privoxy [www.privoxy.org] for an easy out of the box experience.