Hi all,
I’m getting a pc for my daughter. I’ll install Fedora KDE Spin. I’m looking for a parental control solution that also integrates with her Android phone. I’m currently using Google’s Family Link which while not great it offers enough. I’d be happy to move to any other solution that can count both device’s usage screen time as one so she doesn’t use up her phone and then move to the PC.
Any cool recommendations?
There’s some free dns servers which block certain stuff (pretty sure adguard has them, other products are available) which can be set on the router and/or the device itself. This is not very flexible but it’s easy to set up.
// sry for offtop but
Is everyone is fine with parental control nowadays? It was for paranoid parents only in my childhood and I didn’t know anyone with parental control really.
The worst thing to me and my friends was hidden power supply cable if you did something really wrong.
It’s not really random internet strangers’ place to judge someone’s parenting choices. We don’t know their overall parenting style, the personality of the child, what lessons they may be trying to teach, etc. The only thing we know for certain is that they want to use parental controls, perhaps to ensure they stay safe as they learn how to use the internet responsibly while also having a level of autonomy.
That’s not helicopter parenting, that’s just prudent.
Exactly. I don’t personally have kids so I also feel especially out of line telling someone else how to raise theirs. Parenting isn’t easy, and there’s tough questions like “How do I get my child to learn good habits around screen time so they don’t end up addicted to devices built for addiction?” Honestly, I personally don’t know a better way other than loosely (not strictly) limiting screen time enough so that they naturally learn good habits over time, and that unfortunately means you need to monitor screen time. As an adult I noticed a lot of my good habits were things my parents instilled in me in my youth that I hadn’t really thought about, like drinking a lot of water, for one. They didn’t prevent me from drinking soda at all, but they limited my intake at home and made sure when I was home I was drinking lots of water and not just juice or soda, they didn’t try to control me outside of the house when I was making my own decisions… and now I drink water a lot because it just feels normal. It’s a habit they got me into, and because it became a habit I’m left with a good habit in my adulthood. I don’t see how it would be any different in getting a kid to respect screen time as an adult.
God… I wish my parents had done more to monitor my screen time because I’m bad at this shit.
Personal opinion, I don’t understand why more parents haven’t moved to use Pi-Holes for content blocking. Since you can tailor your own blocklists, it’s not impossible to do, and I’m pretty sure some enterprising folks have already made a Pi-Hole block list for porn and various adult websites.
Further, if your child figures out how to bypass the block, they’re learning valuable skills, if nothing else.
To be fair, it seems like you’re more concerned with overall screen time, and I don’t have a better solution for that than you already have.
Maybe limiting internet usage is enough, spending extra time on a linux pc with no internet might just be an opportunity to learn something.
Pihole can be broken with a free vpn, or even just forced DNS on device.
True!
I take comfort that if my kid can figure out setting up their own VPN or DNS, then I’m sure they’ll earn enough later to support their porn habit.
I don’t know… Have you seen the rates for Findom lately!?
Run pihole with a MikroTik router at your houses demarc.
Set up firewall rules in the tik to redirect any packet with dst tcp/udp 53 outbound on wan to the pihole. If you’re worried about dns when pihole is down, create disabled rules to allow the dns traffic as well, then set up a scheduler script using if blocks to toggle the sets of rules depending on status. This will force any client on your network, even one with hardcoded dns IPs, to use the pihole.
If the client is configured for DoH you’ll just have to build out an ip block list in the MikroTik and block all known DoH IPs.
Create firewall rules to drop all vpn traffic you can, combining port based rules and similar IP lists as for DoH, but subbing in VPN provider IPs. If you want to route your home traffic over a vpn, set up a vpn client in the router itself and basically site-to-site your home to the vpn provider you use.
This would block the vast majority of kids trying to bypass parents blocks, but it’s asking quite a lot from the parents who don’t have experience configuring this stuff already.
I knew the forced dns thing because I have a pihole, and blocking port 53 traffic not heading to my two PIs has not happened yet, despite my best efforts. Shit aint simple for me, much less regular people.
My router can limit access time but I’m not sure if it’s on a device by device basis. Might be worth checking.
Hi again. Great idea indeed! Just use pi-hole and block all NSFW content, sites and ads.
I can’t quite get a read on if you’re being sarcastic or not, but if you are you should know that there are curated porn blocklists for pihole. This obviously won’t stop anyone from accessing porn via nsfw channels on sites that are not exclusively nsfw, like lemmy, Reddit, tumblr, or whatever.
Parental controls are one of the under developed parts of Linux, the only major one I know of is timekpr
I haven’t researched this (I don’t have kids), but out of curiosity, what type of mobile device is your daughter using? Also, I think PiHole is a solid recommendation like others recommend.
Otherwise, from a quick Google, I don’t know of anything that can integrate both Linux PC and mobile phone screen time. Honestly, this sounds like a fun project I could implement someday if I ever had the will. However, for right now, in terms of screen time all I can think of is reading system logs (perhaps via SSH) to manually analyze your daughter’s screen time.
Try ActivityWatch! Releases page here. There is even an AppImage.
Then also install: aw-watcher-web to track duration on sites (eg. firefox).
What’s Activity Watch do?
I looked at Github, by like so many projects there, the descriptions vary from minimal to non-existant.
ActivityWatch tracks time under Linux across all your applications and windows. So you know where you spent your most time on. It can categorize them as well for you. And there are plugin for eg. for Firefox to also track time on sites, etc. So you get a much better understanding about how you spent your time (maybe too much youtube? Or are you too much recompiling the kernel all day?).
Oh, cool. Thanks for the recommendation!
The goal of ActivityWatch is simple: Enable the collection of as much valuable lifedata as possible without compromising user privacy.
We’ve worked towards this goal by creating an application for safe storage of the data on the user’s local machine and as well as a set of watchers which record data such as:
Currently active application and the title of its window Currently active browser tab and its title and URL Keyboard and mouse activity, to detect if you are AFK (“away from keyboard”) or not
It is up to you as user to collect as much as you want, or as little as you want (and we hope some of you will help write watchers so we can collect more).
Well, they linked to the releases page instead of the main page for the project, for one.
I also linked to the readme as well… If you click on “ActivityWatch”.
I need to change my default colors then, because it was way too easy to miss that first link. That’s on me.
My bad… I should make it all text with hyperlinks instead. --> fixed
I appreciate it, but genuinely, the best thing about Lemmy is being in control of how you view your own feed, and so (especially considering I’m fucking red-green colorblind lol) it really is my responsibility to make it readable for myself. Thanks for being a good fellow, regardless.
Hmm, I couldn’t find that anywhere. Thanks again.
if you want a paid version similar to pihole with a bit more control and insights I recommend a smart DNS service like Control D.
For phone, a couple things.
Look for Mobile Device Management. I’ve been meaning to do this for family for years.
Flyve is an open source MDM. I’ve only tested it so far. You may want to look around for others.
To help with file management on Android, I setup sync jobs between the phone and a desktop (or a user’s laptop) for certain folders, things like DCIM, Download, Movies, Pictures, etc (and certain app data folders such as Camscanner) using Syncthing-Fork on the phone, and Syncthing or SyncTrayzor on a pc. Doing this enables file management from the pc, as changes can sync back to the phone (and since I want my photos on my pc anyway…). Syncthing can work across most any network, including the internet and your phone data plan (so don’t let it sync big stuff using data). It can be locked with a password too, to prevent little hands from mucking things up.
You could, in theory, just let it sync the entire sdcard, but lots of stuff changes all the time, such as app data in the Android folder. No reason to sync that stuff. Plus doing that doesn’t permit finer control of sync for things like DCIM, which I permit to sync over any network and any power state.
Syncthing also works between two or more phones, or PCs (windows or Linux), and has lots of flexibility for sync. I use it extensively to share stuff with friends so we don’t have to think about sharing, especially for larger files. I sync files between phones with no PC, some sync jobs use a pc as intermediary so both phones don’t need to be connected all the time, etc.
Another sync tool, Resilio, is really good. But on the phone it’s a major memory and battery hog, so I use it only for it’s selective Sync feature, and keep it turned off otherwise.
These are just my ideas, everyone’s use-case is different. Your problem is one I’ve been lazily working on for years, so I look forward to the other ideas that come up here.
Flyve’s site says that it’s ceased development, which I found to be slightly amusing since this is the first I’ve heard of it. I have a lot of experience in the MDM space, and to be perfectly frank, for Android your best option is staying first party and sticking with Family Link. The MDM APIs in android land are a hot mess, and have been since their inception, and 3rd party solutions have only ever been adequate at best.
The MDM APIs in android land are a hot mess
Ain’t that the truth.
I avoid Google stuff, actually going Google free on the phone I’m setting up now, so Family Link is out for me. And I try to avoid all-eggs-in-a-basket anyway.
Yea, it sucks. I’ve looked at a LOT of MDM for Android.
