"WWW parental responsibility" - a modest proposal

[Sharon Centanne]

At 01:54 PM 12/5/97 -0800, you wrote:

>The Global History is a URL (live links) and Date/Time listing for every
>URL that's been displayed in recent days.
>"Recent days" is defined as the time you've set under Preferences, where
>it says "Pages in history expire after __ days." 
>

>Simple method for "keeping track of the kids on the Net":
>
>1) Set the "history" preference to whatever's useful.
>2) Use the about:global command periodically to display the record of
>recent site browsing. 
>3) Scan the URL list for questionable stuff, click on the link to look
>for yourself, if you're suspicious.


Hi Everyone!

Thank you Ernest for this timely information.  I spent most of yesterday
afternoon
trying to rid my high school library Internet Center of URL histories.
Seems one
kid will come in and go to an inappropriate site like www.playboy.com and if not
caught, another kid will use the history from the drop down box in Netscape
or IE
(we have both) to return to the same site.  They use this because we have
disabled
bookmarks!

It is against our library, school, and school district policies to allow
students to use
these taxpayer-financed machines for anything other than class-assigned
research.
So I have been setting the Security in IE to 0, disabling Java, and getting
rid of histories in
both browsers. I also set the history dates to 0, because if I can see where
kids have been,
then so can the other kids who use the history list for suggestions!

>Yeah, any knowledgeable kid CAN clear the global history, or set it to 0
>>(zero) days, or delete the global history file.

Does anyone know if there is a way to lock the configurations set in Netscape or
IE to prevent this?  Our use of Foolproof and ConfigSafe95 doesn't seem to
stop it.

You may have more problems enforcing these policies in a public library, but
in a school,
we can designate our Internet connections for education related purposes only.

Good luck folks!  It is a never ending battle to keep the kids using the
Internet
appropriately!

Thank you,

Sharon Centanne

Media Network Specialist
Lakewood High School
St. Petersburg, Florida

>-------------
>
>  But that's not any
>crisis, it's gonna be obvious. It's an opportunity for a little bit of
>kid/parent dialog. :-) Probably time to talk about boundaries and
>conditions. "I don't care if IE v. 99 is wonderful, we WILL use
>Netscape;" "We WILL leave the History preference at 14 days." Seriously,
>absence of the file, or date/times that end two weeks ago, are a pretty
>obvious alert that something might be up.
>

>cheers,
>
>-ernest perez
>Ernest Perez//Oregon State Library//perez at opac.state.or.us//503-378-4243
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"Sometimes you have to grab the bull by the tail and face the
>situation."
>    - W.C. Fields
>