[SOLVED] Parental control at router level blocking certain sites and certain hours

[amir777]

Hi everyone,

I am looking for an internet parental control solution that would enable blocking internet connection to certain sites/apps/games during certain hours of the day. For example, I want to disable access to Youtube, Roblox, GTA and etc. from 6 PM onwards during the weekdays (so the kids would study).

Do you know of any platform providing this feature?

Thank you,
Amir

 

[bill001g]

There are many routers that have parental controls. The main problem you have is everything is now encrypted so it makes it much harder to filter web sites . Chrome and firefox can also encrypt the DNS which is how some software was attempting to get the site after all sites started using HTTPS. You generally must put in lists of ip addresses but this does not work for all sites because a lot of stuff is cloud based and there are many ip addresses for sites and some actually share the same IP address with other sites.

Your best bet is not to try to filter content. Either block everything by the machines mac addresses at a certain time, this prevents the kids from using vpn software. Or block all ip and then allow the sites you want to work. Only allowing some sites can be tedious because many access a number of ip addresses so it really only works for simple conditions.

Smart kids will quickly figure out how to fake the mac address to bypass restriction though.

The only thing that works well is software you load on the end machines. This has access before the data in encrypted. Not sure what you do about things like phones where you are much more limited in the software you can get.

 

[Sharpnel13]

As a rule, your Internet provider should have such a service. Try to check with them.