parental controls for OLPC laptop?

Hi, I'm buying a XO/OLPC laptop for my 6 year old nephew. It runs
Linux/Sugar/etc.

I've been investigating solutions to have parental controls over his
web surfing.

I'm not a real fan of surveillance, but gosh, if I can keep out the
porn at least, that would be a victory.


Can anyone recommend anything on the machine itself? It has to be a
relatively lightweight and user-friendly solution.

From what I've read, the content filtering on the hardware router
doesn't seem very reliable or good. (Linksys for example has stopped
supporting its parental controls feature on its laptop).

I'm going to be running a club for children who own a OLPC and will
probably need to give advice. (In houston, we have mainly Comcast and
ATT DSL, which offer Windows-based filtering solutions...not relevant
here).

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/raskin/1...0#see_comments
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/devlin/7...0#see_comments
http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens2.html#pcsb
http://kids.getnetwise.org/tools/

I probably could set cookies for google and yahoo for kid-friendly
stuff. But that doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. Can anyone
recommend other solutions good for linux surfers?

Robert Nagle
Houston, Texas
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:39:50 -0800, idiotprogrammer wrote:

> Hi, I'm buying a XO/OLPC laptop for my 6 year old nephew. It runs
> Linux/Sugar/etc.
>
> I've been investigating solutions to have parental controls over his
> web surfing.
>
> I'm not a real fan of surveillance, but gosh, if I can keep out the
> porn at least, that would be a victory.
>
>
> Can anyone recommend anything on the machine itself? It has to be a
> relatively lightweight and user-friendly solution.
>

Dan's guardian.

> From what I've read, the content filtering on the hardware router
> doesn't seem very reliable or good. (Linksys for example has stopped
> supporting its parental controls feature on its laptop).
>
> I'm going to be running a club for children who own a OLPC and will
> probably need to give advice. (In houston, we have mainly Comcast and
> ATT DSL, which offer Windows-based filtering solutions...not relevant
> here).
>
> http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/raskin/1...0#see_comments
> http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/devlin/7...0#see_comments
> http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens2.html#pcsb
> http://kids.getnetwise.org/tools/
>
> I probably could set cookies for google and yahoo for kid-friendly
> stuff. But that doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. Can anyone
> recommend other solutions good for linux surfers?
>
> Robert Nagle
> Houston, Texas
> http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/

re: dan's guardian,
http://dansguardian.org/?page=requirements

it says: DansGuardian 2 probably requires as a minimum 150Mhz per 50
users and 32Mb per 50 users plus 150Mhz and 64Mb. The memory
requirement is more for the cacheing proxy than DansGuardian. A
minimum of maybe 4Gb hard drive is required. If you have fast Internet
connectivity (like 512Kbit/sec or more) then think about allocating
more CPU.

http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml
the specs says the laptop has 256 mb ram (but has an sd card slot).

is the caching proxy necessary to run dan's guardian?






On Nov 23, 10:10 pm, ray <r...@zianet.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:39:50 -0800, idiotprogrammer wrote:
> > Hi, I'm buying a XO/OLPC laptop for my 6 year old nephew. It runs
> > Linux/Sugar/etc.
>
> > I've been investigating solutions to have parental controls over his
> > web surfing.
>
> > I'm not a real fan of surveillance, but gosh, if I can keep out the
> > porn at least, that would be a victory.
>
> > Can anyone recommend anything on the machine itself? It has to be a
> > relatively lightweight and user-friendly solution.
>
> Dan's guardian.
>
> > From what I've read, the content filtering on the hardware router
> > doesn't seem very reliable or good. (Linksys for example has stopped
> > supporting its parental controls feature on its laptop).
>
> > I'm going to be running a club for children who own a OLPC and will
> > probably need to give advice. (In houston, we have mainly Comcast and
> > ATT DSL, which offer Windows-based filtering solutions...not relevant
> > here).
>
> >http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/raskin/1...&comment_count...
> >http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/devlin/7...&comment_count...
> >http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens2.html#pcsb
> >http://kids.getnetwise.org/tools/
>
> > I probably could set cookies for google and yahoo for kid-friendly
> > stuff. But that doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. Can anyone
> > recommend other solutions good for linux surfers?
>
> > Robert Nagle
> > Houston, Texas
> >http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/

SafeSquid - Content Filtering Proxy - Free version (Composite 20)
Easy and quick installation, browser based GUI for management.
Gives you 'Total Access Control' and 'Total Content Control'
Use URL Blacklist + Keyword Filter + URL Filter + Pornographic Image
Filter for totally blocking access to porn sites. (Image Filter,
though, is a commercial Add-on module).

idiotprogrammer wrote:
> Hi, I'm buying a XO/OLPC laptop for my 6 year old nephew. It runs
> Linux/Sugar/etc.
>
> I've been investigating solutions to have parental controls over his
> web surfing.
>
> I'm not a real fan of surveillance, but gosh, if I can keep out the
> porn at least, that would be a victory.
>
>
> Can anyone recommend anything on the machine itself? It has to be a
> relatively lightweight and user-friendly solution.
>


Our solution for classrooms, home schools, SOHO, businesses, is to use
IPCOP on a spare box in a closet. We invoke Spamassassin and Dan's
Guardian, there. The initial 20 minutes will be slow as it builds the
database of URLs.

Any box, 100Mhz to 800 Mhz is good. We like to use a 500mhz or faster
cpu, to handle all the traffic, with 64MB RAM, and a hard drive of 6 to
20 GB, plus two NICS will serve up to about 36 clients.

http://ipcop.org

It works to protect all computers running any OS, without the burden
that slows down any system.