Parental controls

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This article is about computer options. For the TV series, see Parental Control. For the software included with Windows Vista, see Windows Parental Controls.
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Parental controls provide parents with automated tools to help protect their children while using devices and services. These controls may include: alerting a parent when their child's device leaves school, limiting their car speed to a certain maximum speed, or controlling the content which the child views on a device connected to the Internet.

Parental controls are optional features typically included in digital television services, computer and video games, Mobile phones and computer software. Parental controls fall into roughly three categories, content filters, which limit access to age-appropriate content, usage controls, which constrain the usage of these devices such as placing time-limits on usage or forbidding certain types of usage, and monitoring , which can track location and activity when using the devices.

Content filters were the first popular type of parental controls to limit access to Internet content. Also television stations began introducing V-Chip technology to limit access to television content. Controls are now being applied to all manner of new content ranging from explicit songs to objectionable movies available for purchase online. Usage controls are increasing in sophistication; examples include - turning devices off during specific times of day; Ford has introduced a feature to limit to the volume of the music playing in the car, and with GPS technology becoming affordable, it is now possible to know where a child is at curfew.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Several techniques exist aimed at creating parental controls for blocking websites. Add-on parental control software may monitor API in order to observe applications such as a web browser or Internet chat application and to intervene according to certain criteria, such as a match in a database of banned words. Virtually all parental control software includes a password or other form of authentication to prevent unauthorised users from disabling it.

Techniques involving a proxy server are also used. A web browser is set to send requests for web content to the proxy server rather than directly to the web server intended. The proxy server then fetches the web page from the web server on the web browser's behalf and passes on the content to the browser. Proxy servers can inspect the data being sent and received and intervene depending on various criteria relating to content of the page or the URL being requested, for example, using a database of banned words or banned URLs. The proxy method's major disadvantage is that it requires that the client application to be configured to utilize the proxy, and if it is possible for the user to reconfigure applications to access the Internet directly rather than going through the proxy then this control is easily bypassed. Proxy servers themselves may be used to circumvent parental controls.

[edit] Commonly-used methods to bypass parental controls

Several methods of bypassing parental controls are commonly used. If the filtering software is located locally within the computer, all Internet software can be easily bypassed by booting up the computer in question from alternative media or with an alternative operating system. However, if the computer's BIOS is configured to disallow booting from removable media, and if changes to the BIOS are prohibited without proper authentication, then this approach is not available.

Another technique involves using external proxy servers or other servers. The user sends requests to the external server which retrieves content on the user's behalf. Filtering software may then never be able to know which URLs the user is accessing, as all communications are with the one external server and filtering software never sees any communications with the web servers from which content really originated. To counter this, filtering software may also block acces to popular proxies. Additionally, filtering systems which only permit access to a set of allowed URLs will not permit access anything outside this list, including proxy servers.

[edit] Video game systems that have used parental controls

Listed in chronological order

[edit] Operating systems with parental controls

 Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (May 2007)

Below is a list of operating systems which currently have parental control features:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls"
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