I've been through the basic filtering pros and cons arguments many times (and will be many times again I'm sure), as custodian of network connectivity at a public library system. Without rehashing good points already raised, let me just throw in that where I work the feds gave us an ultimatum "filter or lose certain funds" and we chose to lose those funds on two grounds: (a) there is no technology that actually puts us in compliance with the laws as written, and (b) trying would be more expensive than losing said funds. We just can't put a federal judge inside each of our computers (we tried, but it was a tight fit, and their robes kept igniting on the heat sinks ;).

That said, we never considered white listing a viable solution. In the case of a parent trying to put parental controls on their home network, I'd personally agree that's a fine thing (though the method of making the access points themselves public and well-supervised is far better, as noted by others). If you must white list, consider a reasonably simple canned solution like Public Web Browser.

OMG... I cannot believe I just recommended not using Perl.

Assuming your kids computer is Windows, you can easily type your list of allowed sites into its proxy settings (as Administrator) and put it into kiosk mode to let regular users access your preferred sites only.

In reply to Re: Can I use Http::Proxy to intercept and deny URLs? by madizen
in thread Can I use Http::Proxy to intercept and deny URLs? by slloyd

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