We may run a computer with linux, if that changes anything. What are people using?
It's very cheap ($1.99/mo) and has an app (macOS/Windows/iOS/Android) that provides filtering/monitoring on the go, even when they aren't at home. Also block ads and malware sites.
There's also the not-well-marketed Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for Families, introduced 4 years ago today. I have not tried it, but it may be too simplistic for HN readers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families
At one point I used Circle (since acquired by aura.com) as well. It was okay, but had a terrible app.
I think my only gripe is it blocks a lot of email unsubscribe links so I have to allow list them to unsubscribe and some wifi hot spots with captive portals (like when flying) breaks third party DNS providers, so I have to turn it off to connect.
I can sometimes be arsed to disable stuff until it works, but often it's a good pause where I consider whether I give enough of a crap about the site to bother.
For Amazon devices, the only way I have found to use it is via an app - this can be turned off.
Or, you could run it at the router level with some funky dns routing (my router allows different dns for different devices), but that might not work with the logging function.
Initially had an Amazon Fire 10 HD (actually, initially a 7) - the kids setup is very good, providing games, books and audio books but they do not offer on the iPad.
So, iPad is set up to be blocked, with nextdns as a backup.
The best you can do to protect kids online is to teach them the importance of online anonymity, why ad blocking is essential and how to avoid infecting a computer with malware.
Also, the internet is currently being scapegoated by the media for the teen mental health crisis but this is only happening in the US and other countries also have teens with internet access. Just like school shootings, this problem is being blamed on scapegoats because the real causes of the problem are politically untouchable and want to deflect the blame on anything else to stay that way. The moral panic over teens and social media is really just the "Grand Theft Auto is turning kids into murderers" of this generation.
[Citation needed]
The teenage mental health crisis is across a wide range of countries, all starting roughly with the smartphone. Here's one discussion on Nordic countries that demonstrates a rise in teen mental health issues at exactly the same time we saw in the US: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa... - and the data for various other European and Asian nations all looks about the same.
Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause.
Similarly, starting with the conclusion that smartphones and social media must be the problem, you’ll deflect away from a lot of contradictory evidence that suggest a more complex interplay between other societal issues, and that smartphones/social media are—if anything—likely just illuminating and amplifying known and pre-existing root causes of poor mental health in young people: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and pressure to excel[0].
Literature reviews of social media and smartphone use show “conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” and “do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect”[1]. Some hypothesised alternative causes of increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms with some stronger effect sizes include: increases in online bullying, decreases in sleep, long-term effects of the Great Recession (and, by extension, the European debt crisis), biological changes[2], restrictions on independent activity[3], and climate change[4]. Even before the invention of the smartphone, psychopathologies in young Americans had increased by a full standard deviation[5] over the previous 70 years. The number of teens that report extremely high levels of stress doubles during the school year[6], yet there is little blame currently being cast in that direction, despite it being the overwhelmingly largest self-reported source of stress at 83%.
Claiming causation from such weak evidence is not merely foolish, it’s potentially quite dangerous. Despite the parent commenter’s incorrect claim that this is purely an American issue, they are almost certainly correct that smartphones and social media are currently being used as scapegoats so society can avoid confronting and addressing the deeply entrenched and deeply uncomfortable root causes of harm. I think this can be seen, at least in part, in the casual discarding of evidence that—especially for marginalised groups[7]—access to online spaces can be protective to young peoples’ mental health.
Trying to avoid discussing the root problems is bad enough on its own, since it means they will not be fixed, but the proposed solution of using restrictive mediation—that is, shielding young people from harm rather than educating them—is almost certainly worse than doing nothing at all[8].
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31697105/
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015269/
[3] https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/depression/2023-gray.pdf
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00059-3
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19945203/
[6] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-r...
[7] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305121988931
[8] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
You could bypass it 30 years ago, sure - but things have gotten a lot more locked down since then, with the rise of smartphones and tablets. Maybe the censorship tech managed to take advantage of that?
Obviously I haven't followed the advances in such things myself - but there could be some better stuff out there these days.
Go find me a simple way to block DNS over HTTPS at a router, so requests are forced to the DNS server I have control over (Pi-Hole or such). I've yet to find one that doesn't involve "Maintaining a list of DNS-over-HTTPS providers and blocking them by IP."
You could also require all traffic to go through a MITM proxy so you can inspect it, though that wouldn't work so well for guests.
> this is only happening in the US
Not true last I checked. There's also a global phenomenon of worsening school performance, correlated strongly with the proliferation of smartphones.
correlation does not imply causation, especially likely to be entirely spurious with time series data
I have seen zero evidence to suggest that schools are worsening everywhere.
> management by target and metrics, excessive pressure to achieve
That is not new.
edit: Haidt recently had a word responding to critics tangentially related to this -- https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1774571680511508601
Beyond that, I will look for the good replies on this post - I am leaning towards "big hammer" blocking and allowing/curating sites/videos. The Internet is a big place.
I'm also trying to teach my kids the idea of files and how everything on the computer are pretty much all files.
Interesting. As a generation that grew up on Windows, that's probably my mental model as well. Keeping specific files like music, videos, photos organized and sharing them on pen-drives was a big thing even 10 years ago - and to an extent, this is completely gone. Can you expand why you want to teach that?
Files have metadata that describes to the operating system what they are for, and how they are to be used.
Etc, etc.
This is information that I think will be very enlightening for them, even though not strictly required to operate a computer these days.
It's more generous to assume that the OP is asking what tools they should consider to support, rather than replace, their parental duties.
It is a good model, but it depends on the age of the kid too. More mature kids will follow through, but all of them, including adults, will need help when the attack is strong from online companies.
What is certain sites? X-rated? Political views different than your own? Only allowing religious content?
White listing for total control but high effort and use a black list less control but less effort. You could always not allow usage without a parent present but that's extremely high effort.
My thinking was whitelisting in the beginning, but I'm not sure what I actually want to allow access to.
At which point, they don't need digital devices. Take the time and effort you'd spend on that and buy them legos or something age-suitable, and keep them in the physical world as long as you possibly can.
My kid has a tablet, but we limit the amount of time he spends on it. Seems healthy to me.
If it's anything with touch screens, it's designed to be so easy that you don't have to worry about it. They'll pick it up trivially later in life.
If it's how to use a keyboard, mouse, and Linux shell? Have at it. I've met more than a few 8-10 year olds who literally don't know how to use a mouse, because everything they've ever interacted with is touch screen.
But I'll take "a kid who played with legos and outside a lot" over "a kid who was electronically literate" any day.
But I do want to build some level of digital literacy, and most importantly just make sure they learn how to type properly when the time comes. Hence the question, I want to introduce them to tech with extreme caution.
It's better to have DNS policies: NextDNS, Pihole, Adguard, etc.
If you go with a DNS filter, make sure the browser they will have access to does not use DoH (Firefox does conditionally by default now).
I would go with good adblockers and a domain-tool like Pihole or similar. They usually have some decent block lists that will catch 90% of accidental attempts to visit bad places, and blocking ads cuts out 99% of the temptations there anyway.
Put the computer(s) in a public place in the house, make sure they have a decently sized screen so parents walking by can see what's going on.
Make sure the kids know they will never get in major trouble by telling you what is happening, and no trouble at all if someone (online) told them not to tell you - those are big red flags.
Maybe https://invidious.io could be modified to only show "approved" channels?
Show genuine interest in their activities, and equip them to make their own decisions when using the internet.
While what you say is a good idea, i think it's not as black and white as "you can" or "you can't";
You can have some form of ... "technical protection" also, knowing it's not perfect.
What percentage of kids do you think will ultimately circumvent your restrictions? I think its a very high likelihood they will access the information using another avenue (at friends house, on a different device, etc). So you are back at square 1 in terms of actually preparing your kid for life.
You're calling it "information" as though what concerns parents is tantamount to eating from the tree of knowledge. You have to account for frequency, because this isn't a question of finding out some dark truths, it's concern that they would recreationally watch content that is not fit for kids, which may have negative impacts especially if consumed on a regular basis.
How many hours did you spend trying to pirate pornography as a kid? Did that have a positive impact on your life? I can answer that readily for my part.
The problem here is that the tech providers have A/B tested "engagement" (overriding the will of the people using their product towards the tech providers own profit goals) on so many people that it's actually quite difficult to make one's own decisions with a default interaction these days.
Some writers have been doing some work lately on the concept of "Cognitive liberty" - freedom from undesired influences on ones thinking. It's worth pondering through in how one interacts with the common services on the internet these days.
But "kids" and "making wise decisions on their own" don't really go together. Not until well into young adulthood.
We need legislation that bans these behaviors that companies use to hoodwink us. They're getting away with whatever they want to do.
They also have to know that doing certain things online constitutes "messing up".
My eventual plan is to have a tool that works independently for each devices and home-ish setup that I can keep tinkering while taking care of the home-devices that stays home.
Then setup each kid with their own accounts and add them to the fam sub.
1) this removed the absolutely revolting adverts. and revolting aside, it stops the videos being interrupted. Kids these days self educate with youtube videos (my sone taught himself to code via youtube videos). you dont want adverts interrupting that process. (I live in hope that one day youtube will let premium subscribers turn off "shorts")
2) log into the kids youtube accounts after they have gone to bed every few days and unsubscribe them from the rubbish you know they'll click the sub button for, and then subscribe them to things you'd like them to see more often. They will have no idea you;re guiding their viewing experience.
We have pi-hole too, primarily for blocking ads and call-homes.
It won’t work if your kids install and use another browser on the device (iCab, Firefox, etc.), but I suppose you could lock down app installations on whatever iCloud account is set up on the device (or with Parental Controls).
The subscription is fairly inexpensive and the app’s blacklists are updated regularly. As a bonus, it blocks in-app tracking.
(No affiliation, just a happy user.)
* Not buying them smartphones or tablets or laptops.
* Only allowing them access to a desktop PC (or even a Raspberry Pi) with a large monitor in a public space like the living room. You don't have to watch over their shoulder, but there's only so many things they'll look at while worrying about "being caught". And if they have problems with excessive usage that interferes with their other responsibilities or just the house rules, you can just take the power supply.
For my young, innocent children, my goal was to protect from accidental clicks. Ad-blocking DNS (pihole, NextDNS) is very effective for that.
Then they got a little older and had friends showing them gore and horror things (because they had unlimited access). This was not age-appropriate content and resulted in multiple sleepless nights as they tried to process the images. Not wanting to perpetuate the cycle, I installed Qustodio on their Android devices. I'm satisfied with that.
I recently bought a Synology RT6600ax and love it. It gives the ability to assign different devices to different sets of network rules so I can customize my parenting to my children as they go through different developmental phases. Having this is a good complement to qustodio because you can configure it to shut off internet for all devices in one place. It does take a technical user to use it to it's potential though.
The no cell service will be the most difficult, we gave-in to pressure from grandmother, it was a mistake.
Now let's say, you have your children's devices on their own separate SSID on its own Vlan, with some DNS restrictions, oh wait they can just turn on their personal hotspot on their phone and connect their other devices to it because Screen Time has no way of disabling that feature, and AT&T has no ability to do this on their own (Verizon can do this however).
If they're old enough for a phone, they're old enough to figure out how to get around your blocks. Our 12 year old was informed of a Discord server (at school by other students) specifically for sharing proxy websites that get around website blocking on their devices. And the urls were all inconspicuous, like a website about minecraft skins has a subdomain just for hosting a web proxy.
You can do your best to block, but education around bad actors and what to look out for on the internet is far more valuable here imo.
Any schoolteacher from the last 15 years could tell you about "Cool Math Games" (contains very few math games, does host tower defense games.)
The short answer is, "No, there is not. There are simply ways to make it harder." However, there's no shortage of companies happy to sell you things they claim will do that - impossible though it is, having been a kid, and having done a lot of network related work in my years.
What you can do is provide an environment in which it's harder (not impossible - simply harder!) to run across stuff unintentionally, and ensure that computing hardware is an environment where it's more difficult to start intentionally bypassing boundaries set up.
A Pihole is a good start, but it's also trivial to bypass unless you lock down your network pretty hard, prevent external DNS servers from being usable (blocking UDP/TCP 53 outbound from everything but the pihole goes a long way here), and manage to block DNS over HTTPS (which is a bloody nightmare), as well as external SSH connections you can SOCKS proxy over. Assuming there's a good endpoint. However, the Pihole will help keep the amount of crap down, and should do a decent job (with proper blocklists) of helping prevent unintentionally following links one doesn't care to follow (think "hosts entries to block certain goat and tub sites," if you were on the internet in the early 2000s).
Any computer a kid is using needs to be in a public space in the house, with decent foot traffic, and you should ask them what they're doing often enough that it's clear you're paying at least some attention.
No cell phones with browsers or mobile devices until they're quite a bit older (mid teens, maybe?). If they need a cellular device, get them a flip phone.
And then beyond that, it's going to be kid specific.
And make sure there are plenty of things to do that don't involve computers in their lives.
The book that just came out, "The Anxious Generation," by Haidt, goes into some detail on the results of our experiments of more or less unlimited internet warfare on the development of kids, and the results are an absolute disaster, especially for tween/teen girls (in terms of mental health, suicide, happiness, human connection... pick your metric, it's been a disaster for them).
And if you think this is over the top, go spend some time on r/Parenting and look for posts by teachers talking about the sort of absolutely absurd stuff they see on phones from kids in grade school and middle school...
Not without controversy? https://archive.is/KU6FS
Technological progress has historically scared people: https://pessimistsarchive.org/
However, it's a book that's squarely in the topic of "Kids and technology," and is built around research that spans through Covid. I'm aware the concept of reading books is rather outdated, but I still try to suggest long form literature on topics that matter, versus some short form articles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/22/anxious-gene...
They're the sort of newspaper that I would expect would be very, very happy to cheerlead for "Everyone on consumer digital tech, all hours of all the days."
But even then, the article isn't exactly highly critical of the book. It talks about the fact that there's a lot of correlation to make arguments, without even acknowledging the ever-growing pile of studies demonstrating causation - when you ask groups of teenagers or young adults to go without their social media apps or smartphones for a while, they get better for a while in terms of the sort of mental health metrics that have been going nuts lately.
And of course he's writing defensively. There's no shortage of people who will, as you've seen in this discussion, start defending how "people arguing against smartphones" are just "scared of new technology" or such (ignoring that a lot of people who've worked in tech their entire lives and deeply understand the technologies used are some of the leading edge arguing that we shouldn't be using the stuff as we do).
In any case, a discussion about the book is certainly an improvement over other options.
This is all based on blacklisting so is far from infallible. You'll still need to take some interest in what your kids are up to.