slloyd has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am thinking of writing a URL whitelist program so that my kids can only browse to URLs in the whitelist. Any chance I can write this in Perl? It would need to support multiple browsers so I assume it would be best to hook the winsock, right?

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by me
http://www.basgetti.com
http://www.kidlins.com

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: URL Whitelist
by spiritway (Vicar) on Feb 12, 2006 at 07:29 UTC

    I think a lot would depend on how clever your kids are. Since they appear smart enough to bypass a proxy, what is to prevent them from figuring out ways to bypass your script - or even alter it?

      I guess you are right - any security can be bypassed if you are clever enough. I was just hoping to find a way to hook into the network card and so that traffic went through my script first for approval. Ideally I want to be able to create something that simply runs in the background and limits internet traffic requests to the whitelist.

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      by me
      http://www.basgetti.com
      http://www.kidlins.com

Re: URL Whitelist
by mbeast (Beadle) on Feb 12, 2006 at 06:54 UTC
      A proxy would require me to change the browser settings to use the proxy, right? That is how I am doing it now but all my kids have to do to get around it is change the proxy settings to not use it. I was hoping to hook a bit lower into the NIC so I could watch any browser request.

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      by me
      http://www.basgetti.com
      http://www.kidlins.com

        Set up a redirect rule on your firewall for all traffic coming from that IP address intended for port 80 on a remote machine to pass first through a proxy on the firewall. This requires a NAT box with filter rules you can control.