bfulkerson's profile

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Thursday, January 28th, 2021 4:00 PM

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Parental controls not working for most devices

My child has a serious problem with paying attention in school and I have since blocked youtube on my router. To test this, I didn't "trust" any devices and have since found that only a couple devices are prevented from going to youtube.

 

I've searched the forums and found a lot of other parents having this issue over the past year but there are no resolutions from comcast on solving the problem.

 

HOW DO I BLOCK YOUTUBE FOR ALL DEVICES?!

Problem Solver

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948 Messages

4 years ago

Kids are very smart, I have found that they share WiFi passwords with friends close by, there for using their WiFi, completely by passing your router altogether 

New Poster

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1 Message

4 years ago

That is besides the point.  The point is that if they are connected to my managed router, I should be able to control the content.  And this doesn't work for sites like YouTube.  This is something that Xfinity should be fixing, but I have seen post as far back as 2015 that this didn't work, so I'm guessing they don't care about what their users want.

Problem Solver

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948 Messages

4 years ago

If you a simple google search, it will bring up many ways to bypass the parental settings, if your kids have access to google, good luck

Problem Solver

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1.5K Messages

4 years ago

It's a tough one if your kid wants to defeat it.  There are many ways to do this.  Free vpn account.  Using a public socks 5 proxy(also free).  SSH tunnel to a machine outside your network to a friends house.  Tor browser.  Maybe going through a machine at your school -- we would have hijacked a lab machine for this. It's kind of endless and methods are all online -- complete with videos on youtube 🙂

 

Beatings.   Have you tried beatings?  Do it once real good and you'll probably only have to show them the wooden spoon after that.

 

The technical reason why some work, and others don't involves the encrypted traffic, and a little known pre-seeded file of alternate locations that is included in most browsers.  Blocking by domain name will continue to become less effective, and blocking by IP address is not practical for an ever shifting cloud infrastructure.  What can work is parental control on every device locally.  The software isn't free.  For windows, it's a "group policy" editor with an easy interface that sets registery keys.  It can also be defeated with the methods above.

New Poster

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1 Message

4 years ago

Here is what you must do.

 

You have to add the websites as http://www.whatever.com AND https://www.whatever.com

 

Do NOT set it to always. Set "Always Block" to NO. It will default to 0000 to 1159 then you must save the settings. Most websites require the "https://". The https is the secure port for the browser BUT the browser may attempt to redirect to Port 80 which is http://www.blahblah.com. Notice that the "s" is missing after http.

Notice that I blocked Tiktoc on https AND http below.

 

Blocked Sites

+ ADD

  URL When    

1https://www.tiktok.com00:00 - 23:59, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,SunEDITX
2https://www.snapchat.com00:00 - 23:59, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,SunEDITX
3https://www.instagram.com00:00 - 23:59, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,SunEDITX
4http://www.tiktok.com00:00 - 23:59, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,SunEDITX
5http://www.instagram.com00:00 - 23:59, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,SunEDITX

 

Hope this helps!

 

-EddieMR2

Visitor

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1 Message

@eddiemr2 That doesn't work either. I have the same problem with xfinity parental control and they don't care. The best option is to go with 3rd party 

Expert

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108.6K Messages

@user_6d8420 

Please create a new topic of your own here on this board detailing your issue. Thanks. 3-month-old dead thread now being closed.

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