Why Manual Whitelisting works for Kids

As I've blogged previously a few times, I use squid with a simple white list

acl goodsites dstdomain "/etc/squid/goodsites"
http_access allow goodsites our_networks

for blocking access to my kids subnet. I have a very small list of sites, mostly .gov, because after all the government would never post anything inappropriate right?

(I initially allowed the entire TLD but my son started looking up crime statistics on the FBI web site, so made it more restrictive.)

My son has spent hours on the NASA sight downloading pictures, adding them to his GNOME backgrounds (yes his desktop is Ubuntu) editing them with gimp, creating OpenOffice presentations and during hurricane Ike I added weather.com so he's become obsessed with weather. but I was looking for something new.

My wife suggested adding one site at a time so he could take his time with each site.

One of the really cool things about the national geographic website is that topic areas have distinct hostnames, so I could be more granular in terms of blocking access.

1226102204.230     54 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 735 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/fact-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.253     73 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 521 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-body.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.268     81 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 686 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 image/gif
1226102204.438    170 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 1276 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Global/ApplicationAssets/flash/dl-loader.swf - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 application/x-shockwave-flash

There is actually a pretty good music there, too. Lot's of world music My son is playing the Ben Harper song above over and over again.

What he doesn't remember is that he listened to a lot of Ben Harper on KGSR back in Austin. That and a lot of Lucinda Williams.

Good stuff. Good times.