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Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow
by noisy_boy 2y ago
Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc.
I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
- sebastiennight 2y agoI'm thinking that piHole wouldn't work for the same reason? (it's all on the same domain, so DNS-based filtering would be worthless)
- noisy_boy 2y agoSeems like piHole does support regex based filtering: https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/
- sebastiennight 2y agoYes, but the regex is still run at the DNS-filter level, so you can use the regex to filter IPs or domains, not URL paths. You can filter (.*).youtube.com You cannot filter youtube.com/(.*)
- noisy_boy 2y agoThanks for checking it - bad news all around I guess.