Hacker News Reader

Comment by utefan001 | Hacker News Reader

This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites. In order to fix that she has to do 5 Khan problems or read thoery.com, Duolingo, prodigy math, code monkey, splash math, Xtra math, or typing club. It takes her 5 to 7 mins to earn points. My server detects points and re enables DNS replies for YouTube, etc. Best result so far is she now understands how fast 30 mins goes by and has no interest in watching YouTube all afternoon. I have spent ton of time and resources on this last 12 months. We are releasing new beta in 2 weeks. DNSLearning.org. Do Not Stop Learning.

View on HN

This is brilliant. DNS + API is a really smart way to build this. If you haven't done it already, it would be pretty straightforward to post a notification to the child's device (via a companion app on selected platforms) as an additional cue to let them know that they'd used up their time.

I'm halfway tempted to set this up for _myself_. You're absolutely right that 30 minutes is gone in instant when you start in on online entertainment.

We plan to add GitHub progress tracking just for fun. Last year we had full PITM, parent in the middle support, instant YouTube video notification, search history, but 2 problems, I worried parent would login to bank on child's device, exposing creds to server and also, kids use crazy amount of gigs per day. Traffic volume to cloud http proxy was massive during tests.

Implement the proxy on-prem? (Raspberry Pi, etc.)

Yea, that is on our list.

This is an awesome product and congratulations for sticking to this for 12 months.

How have you been trying to market it? What marketing avenues have you been trying? Facebook ads etc?

Marketing plan is evolving. Issue we ran into in January is so many non tech parents stuggled to configure DNS. We hoped to avoid the walled app gardens at first, but only having to install the app to configure is important.

I watched poverty inc documentary and saw how parents with some money in Haiti spent money on private school for children.

I believe, thanks to khan etc, great education already exist, parents just need innovative tools to help keep children on proper path. I reached out to some orphanages / schools in Haiti and they are excited to try this out once android app is complete.

Yes! I've been doing similar manual/analog solutions but it's hard to keep up with

Looks great. As a parent of a 2yo I value this more than at $10/mo and since my kid only uses one tablet I would qualify for free so you probably should increase the prices. Wonder what you think the ideal age is to introduce this?

This is great. Don't have kids, so I'm going to use it on myself.

For the record: 'Circle with Disney' uses ARP poisoning to do this without per-endpoint-setup; a one-time device buy for the home + subscription for on-the-go/mobile data (which VPNs back through the device at home).

https://meetcircle.com/

We are avoiding having a wireless router right now. Circle is time restriction, we feel integration with Khan and other education sites is abetter way to reduce unproductive internet time.

Do you also block Youtube download sites (like keepvid)? Otherwise this may result in her learning (from e.g. advanced friend in school) that she can download a lot of stuff to watch locally during 30 minutes.

Parent has timeline that shows domains summary, and points earned. Parent can whitelist, or block internet sites.

If notifications are enabled, they will know when points are earned on education sites. Parents can easily figure out what's going on and react to it.

This looks very cool, I'm gonna get at least one of my friend's with kids to try this!

Soon your daughter will learn: it's always DNS

That's right! My other project is something I think is very powerful, but nobody so far seems to be to interested. Throwing it out in case someone wants try it.

If you pay attention to malware analysis you will see raw IP addresses and random domains are very common in malware. I think corps should enable their outbound firewalls. Problem now is whitelisting each IP is way too much work.

My tests show a C++ DNS proxy can be used to whitelist IP addresses to ipset hash in iptables just before the DNS proxy responds to client. Raw IPs are now blocked and firewall outbound is coupled to your trusted DNS provider.

This would massively reduce attack surface to domains your org regularly uses. Not resolving new / young domains is important here.

At this point we can blame DNS and the firewall!

My son is smart enough to change DNS IPs to google public DNS servers and the most ridiculous thing is that he studied it on the khanacademy site. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com