I was talking with my younger son today, and he was telling me about the curriculum at his university where he’s studying computer science. He’s really very good at it, and I’m glad he has the opportunity to study. While talking with him, I realized that I have never taken a single programming class in my entire life. Computer science programs pretty much didn’t exist when I started college, and when I went back to school I had already had a long career in software and hardware engineering which I didn’t care to re-hash. That’s why I went into medicine.
I was once interviewed on a television program where they asked for my advice on implementing parental controls on internet access. After all, I had done a lot of work in networking, I was a family doctor, a psychiatrist, and I had just had my first child. All I could think to say, though, was that the only answer was to be present with your internet-using children. There is no firewall or nannyware package or online security package you can get that will successfully block all the bad stuff but none of the good stuff. (Age-verification law proponents be warned!)
My solution, when my children came of internet age, was that all the computers with screens (we had a room full of servers, too, but they were off-limits and not very interesting to children anyway) were in the living room, and all the screens faced the center of the room, and headphones were not allowed. I had remodeled the house so that there was a large pass-through from the kitchen to the living room so I could continue to supervise while in the kitchen, and I folded laundry and such chores in the living room, so I was pretty much there all the time we were inside. They could do what they wanted on the net, but I would see and hear (almost) all, and when inappropriate material came up I was there to process it with them and explain why they should avoid it.
As an additional measure, I did set up the WiFi to turn off at midnight, but I don’t think they ever tried to sneak a contraband device into their bedrooms. Until…
We had one of their friends over for a sleepover, and he was all about testing boundaries. It was clear nobody was going to get much sleep. He had a portable gaming device and not too subtly snuck it into the bedroom. A little while later, they discovered (with a whine) that the WiFi was off. Not too long after, my younger son — eight years old at the time — showed me that he had connected a CAT-5 cable from his computer in the living room to one of the 24-port switches in the server room, and configured his computer to act as a WiFi hotspot. That had enabled the contraband gaming device’s internet connection. Not a bad bit of network engineering prowess for an eight year old in the early twenty-teens, when WiFi configuration could still be something of an art.
In true hacker spirit, he was much more about showing me what could be done to bypass controls than about actually exploiting the bypass. Otherwise, I might never have known.
—2p