I have kids. Two of them,\u00a0the youngest is five and the oldest is about to turn eight years old. Since they see me and\u00a0my wife use a computer regularly, they of course also want to use it. The oldest has access to computers at school,\u00a0and if they are going to be proficient\u00a0with computers, they need to start using them at an early age. I have a MacBook Pro that\u00a0they both have accounts on, both set up with OSX’s default “Parental Control” feature.<\/p>\n
That works fairly well\u00a0when they use the local application (Photo Booth is a favourite, if\u00a0I hadn’t blocked it their little clips would probably have ended up on YouTube if the knew how to upload them). Well,\u00a0before getting to the applications, there are all these little pesky\u00a0pieces of software that phone home on every start-up, under the guise of doing software updates. No matter how many times I block “Google Software Update” or “Paragon Updater” and the like, every time they log in to their accounts, they get a message that they cannot run them. Well, they learn to click “OK” and go on with their life. Using a web browser is a lot more hassle, though.<\/p>\n
I had initially set up\u00a0a whilelist in the\u00a0Parental Control settings, to only allow them to access certain web sites. That doesn’t work, since every site in the universe now include stuff from other places, either be it CDNs, Google’s web tracking stuff or a JavaScript library that they are too bored to copy to their own domain. I can live with that, a lot of it can be blocked with Ghostery or similar, but that is if you can\u00a0even get to it.<\/p>\n
Trying to even run<\/em> a web browser\u00a0on an account that has Parental Control enabled is a chapter in itself. First it is the phone-home auto-update stuff that kicks in every\u00a0few moments. Then there are the pre-installed shortcuts (at least in Opera) that wants to download screenshots to display inside the Speed Dial screen (why can’t they just ship with default images?). Then even trying to type a web address keeps\u00a0trying to send every single keystroke to Google, requiring having\u00a0to close a dialog after every single letter in the URL. In Google Chrome, it seems utterly and completely impossible to disable this behavior. Opera has it, hidden deep inside its configuration options, but I\u00a0then I have to enter a magic\u00a0key combination<\/a> to\u00a0remove the Search field. And fight the\u00a0blocked URL pop-ups to remove the pre-installed Speed Dials.<\/p>\n I need to try out Vivaldi for the kids’ accounts. I know it can be configured to be less intrusive, and it doesn’t send all keystrokes to\u00a0the search engine.\u00a0When I set up the account for\u00a0my oldest daughter there wasn’t a stable version around, but it should be fine now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have kids. Two of them,\u00a0the youngest is five and the oldest is about to turn eight years old. Since they see me and\u00a0my wife use a computer regularly, they of course also want to use it. The oldest has access to computers at school,\u00a0and if they are going to be proficient\u00a0with computers, they need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[8,38,39,9,32,40,10],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-browsers","tag-chrome","tag-frustration","tag-opera","tag-osx","tag-parental-control","tag-vivaldi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.softwolves.com\/wolfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}