High schoolers and laptops

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:High schoolers know how to by pass the system. I had a friend's 12 year old tell my son how to make a bootable memory drive into Linux where they could surf anything they wanted. Kudos to all the expensive $$ you spend on antivirus and hard drive monitoring and all the Internet filtering. Responsibility is what you should be teaching I think. Observe from the home computer before granting the laptop.

Why is antivirus lumped in with the other programs? Any internet-connected computer should have antivirus, even one used by responsible individuals, adults, etc. That's just common sense and responsible computing. Nobody wants a virus messing up their system. Plus, you don't have to spend $$$, there are some decent free programs available.

[Anonymous]

FWIW, open DNS is great but limited --- it does DNS filtering but does not filter content. That means it will prevent your son from visiting www.badPornSite.com by typing that URL into the browser, but it would not prevent him from accessing the site by IP address or from setting his computer to use a different DNS server. To actually block content, you would have to disable all traffic through your router except through a proxy server and then filter via the proxy server. There are devices you can buy to do this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:High schoolers know how to by pass the system. I had a friend's 12 year old tell my son how to make a bootable memory drive into Linux where they could surf anything they wanted. Kudos to all the expensive $$ you spend on antivirus and hard drive monitoring and all the Internet filtering. Responsibility is what you should be teaching I think. Observe from the home computer before granting the laptop.

Or you could try knowing more about technology than a 12 year old. It's not difficult. Yes, you can boot to Linux from a memory stick or Windows from a DVD. Any filtering solution that you use needs to be network based, not device-based. Or you can, for example, disable boot from removable media in the bios and password protect the change.