By Kathleen Acuff
 On this ICRAplus page, the administrator can clear a user’s Internet access history. |
Readers of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” know that the necessary response to the evil afoot in the world is “constant vigilance!” That is also the necessary response of parents who want to protect their children from the more insidious elements crawling the World Wide Web.
As Jim Bentley demonstrated at Almond School Feb. 8, parents can install software to make any Internet site unavailable to their children - as long as the children don’t use the countercharm of changing their password to fool the gatekeeper.
Bentley, a systems administrator for a company in Mountain View, talked to 50 parents about the software - most of it freely downloadable - to install to control their children’s access to Internet sites. He also gave them step-by-step instructions on configuring that software, Windows 2000 or XP operating systems and Internet service providers’ user tools to control access. He discussed anti-virus tools, spyware, filtering platforms, Internet history logs and HTTP cookies - packets of contextual information that Internet sites download to hard drives to identify the user, computer, browser and domain when the computer accesses those sites again.
Logs like “History,” “Go” and cookies are the crumbs your children drop as they make their way through the Internet. Look for them daily or you will fall behind, Bentley advised.
As Officer Susan Anderson of the Los Altos Police Department told parents that evening, “Look at your children’s (Internet) profiles and the sites they’ve gone to. And by the way, pedophiles love to hang out at kids’ Web sites.”
The most important point for parents to take home with them was not to put a computer with Internet access in a child’s room, Anderson said.
“We’re seeing kids wearing their hearts on a hard drive,” Agent John Korges added. “They tell everything on their blogs and in chat rooms. You have to remember that most kids don’t understand the ramifications of their actions.”
Bentley’s instructions can be adapted for Macs. He gave Almond parents instructions for PCs running Windows 2000 and XP Professional because they are so widely used. He recommended that parents upgrade to the more secure XP Professional if they’re now using XP Home edition.
Bentley began by demonstrating that Internet Explorer, bundled with those operating systems, cannot be deleted from a hard drive. It goes into hidden cache and is restored at reboot.
By default, anyone using a new computer is its administrator - the assigner or denier of permission to access an Internet site and any file or folder on the hard drive.
“This is scary. You want to make yourself the administrator and your children users,” Bentley said.
As administrators, parents should create separate passwords for themselves and each child who will use the computer. Separate passwords allow an administrator to set access permissions appropriate for each child and to monitor each child’s computer and Internet use.
To edit Internet Explorer properties, right-click on the program’s icon on the desktop. A menu will appear with tabs for security, content, advanced settings and other options. Click on a tab to access its settings. On the General tab, set “Days to keep pages in history” to 0. On the Security tab, choose the level of security you want for a child’s Internet use.
On the Content tab, you can set up the Content Advisor and control the type of identifying information your computer sends to particular Internet sites. Clicking on the Content Advisor’s Enable button brings up the page on which you specify what a child can see in four categories: language, nudity, sex and violence. Be sure to set the appropriate level of security in each category.
After applying your security settings, return to the Content page and click on the AutoComplete button. Deselect Forms and “User names and passwords on forms.” Click on the Clear Forms and Clear Passwords buttons to prevent your computer’s automatically filling in names and passwords on Internet forms.
Click on the Advanced tab and scroll down the menu to Security. Make sure “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation” and all boxes from “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” through “Use SSL 3.0″ are checked.
Limit manipulation of your Internet Explorer settings through the operating system’s gpedit.msc file. Click on Start, select Run, and in the command line type “gpedit.msc” (without the quotation marks). The Group Policy screen will appear. Select User Configuration and expand the Administrative Templates folder. Scroll down to Windows Components and click on its Internet Explorer folder, then expand the Internet Control Panel subfolder. A list of pages appears. “Enabling” these pages prevents a child’s changing the settings you made to security, programs, connections and other fundamental controls.
Bentley recommended downloading free anti-spyware, anti-spybots, and popup blockers and keeping them up-to-date. Popups, he said, aren’t just ads. They can be pornography or whisk your child to another site.
He also strongly recommended downloading the Internet Content Rating Association’s free filtering platform, ICRAplus (www.icra.org), to gain even more password-protected parental control. Again, make yourself administrator and your children users, and make sure children’s ICRAplus passwords match their machine passwords.
This platform allows you to set filters for sites containing violence, hate, offensive language, nudity, sexual material, chat and other content. ICRAplus has a field in which you can list the URLs (Internet addresses) you want to keep particular passwords from accessing without blocking them for all users. The filter can also block children’s Web sites that are linked to “adult” sites, prevent children’s downloading messenger programs and even keep them out of chat rooms.
“So many sites have links the program thinks might be unsuitable that most URLs are blocked, but you can get in with the admin password,” Bentley said.
These protections won’t work for unspecified passwords, so follow-up is a must. Check your children’s history and cookies to make sure they haven’t changed their passwords. They can go anywhere they want until you add their new passwords to the filtering platform. Be sure the settings in ICRAplus reflect the changes you made to Internet Explorer. Check cookies in My_Computer/Documents_and_Settings/Users/Cookies.
In setting up e-mail accounts, use the same admin and user hierarchy you used in the filtering platform and on the computer itself. Make children’s accounts genderless, and exclude first and last names. Let your Internet service provider know an account is a minor’s, and you can restrict use to certain times and specify e-mail addresses the account can receive. Specifying acceptable addresses also blocks spam and can block attachments.
