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Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with

Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with a parental filter option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a parent through setting up a system if they want something more custom. If people want to push, they should just push to make these set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And perhaps fund some advertising for these features.

direwolf20 8mo ago
Router parental filters are accountability sinks. They don't actually work, and they can't because we spent the last 20 years redesigning network protocols to prevent middle boxes from tampering with connections.
- KoolKat23 8mo ago
  In what sense? DNS blockers work generally do they not? Adguard also censors google search results. I don't see why your kid should be browsing reddit. I mean even only allow whitelisted sites. As I say this can be standardized further. These measures I truly believe do not need to be 100% foolproof so long as the hurdle is high enough that children give up it's fine. And these measures could potentially notify a parent of a suspected breach or attempt to game it, without intruding too much into the child's privacy.
  - ndriscoll 8mo ago
    DNS blockers only work if the device/application is not adversarial or if you also have a smart enough firewall to block DoH, which is designed to blend in with web traffic. Once ECH is widespread, you'd likely need to MitM the device (so you need to install your CA, which is intentionally made very difficult and you might not even be able to do across all apps anymore on mobile devices? At least without enterprise MDM. And as was observed elsewhere[0], apps like spotify can contain a web browser), or perhaps use DNS requests as a trigger to briefly open a default deny outbound firewall. Things have definitely been converging toward making it impossible for non-corporations to manage the devices they own, the network they run, etc. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069
    - KoolKat23 8mo ago
      This is very interesting thanks. I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices. On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate? Are we talking about children or black hats?
      - ndriscoll 8mo ago
        The black hats in this case are the software vendors. If your software prevents any ability to inspect any of its traffic (so you can't use external filters), and the OS doesn't offer ways to override/hook into that, and if the inbuilt parental controls are insufficient, you can't do much. What are you going to do when every application (including web browsers) simply ignores and bypass your DNS filtering "for security" and every site is opaque (e.g. wikipedia looks just like pornhub to your router and every site is using one of a small number of major frontend proxies like cloudflare that's actively specifically working toward traffic opacity)? It happens that every major commercial non-server OS vendor (except Redhat?) is an ad company now, so they all have a reason to block your ability to filter traffic/restrict your configuration to only what they allow. And they're all working toward that.
        KoolKat23 8mo ago
        Good point well made.

direwolf20 8mo ago

Router parental filters are accountability sinks. They don't actually work, and they can't because we spent the last 20 years redesigning network protocols to prevent middle boxes from tampering with connections.

KoolKat23 8mo ago
In what sense? DNS blockers work generally do they not? Adguard also censors google search results. I don't see why your kid should be browsing reddit. I mean even only allow whitelisted sites. As I say this can be standardized further. These measures I truly believe do not need to be 100% foolproof so long as the hurdle is high enough that children give up it's fine. And these measures could potentially notify a parent of a suspected breach or attempt to game it, without intruding too much into the child's privacy.
- ndriscoll 8mo ago
  DNS blockers only work if the device/application is not adversarial or if you also have a smart enough firewall to block DoH, which is designed to blend in with web traffic. Once ECH is widespread, you'd likely need to MitM the device (so you need to install your CA, which is intentionally made very difficult and you might not even be able to do across all apps anymore on mobile devices? At least without enterprise MDM. And as was observed elsewhere[0], apps like spotify can contain a web browser), or perhaps use DNS requests as a trigger to briefly open a default deny outbound firewall. Things have definitely been converging toward making it impossible for non-corporations to manage the devices they own, the network they run, etc. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128069
  - KoolKat23 8mo ago
    This is very interesting thanks. I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices. On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate? Are we talking about children or black hats?
    - ndriscoll 8mo ago
      The black hats in this case are the software vendors. If your software prevents any ability to inspect any of its traffic (so you can't use external filters), and the OS doesn't offer ways to override/hook into that, and if the inbuilt parental controls are insufficient, you can't do much. What are you going to do when every application (including web browsers) simply ignores and bypass your DNS filtering "for security" and every site is opaque (e.g. wikipedia looks just like pornhub to your router and every site is using one of a small number of major frontend proxies like cloudflare that's actively specifically working toward traffic opacity)? It happens that every major commercial non-server OS vendor (except Redhat?) is an ad company now, so they all have a reason to block your ability to filter traffic/restrict your configuration to only what they allow. And they're all working toward that.
      - KoolKat23 8mo ago
        Good point well made.