Circle with Disney

[photon]

I've been looking for a good service/device to monitor and moderate Internet usage at home. As kids get older they get more ingenuous, and these days seems every single device has a browser and Internet connectivity.

Having gone through a few different services and not really liking any of them (mostly due to technical issues), and trying to deal with all the devices that aren't a PC but have a browser (Phones, tablets, Xbox, PS, Nintendo consoles, my freaking Kobo eRreader, etc etc), I decided to try this device:

https://meetcircle.com/

So far I'm liking it a lot. The setup was very easy and everything just works. All the devices on my network show up right away (and I get notifications when a new device it doesn't recognize comes online).

You can assign devices to a specific person (you create profiles for everyone). You can see a usage log, list of sites visited, etc. You can set a wakeup and bedtime so it can't be used outside that. You can set time limits, and set a "no device" time limit as well (i.e. all their devices won't do anything from 5-6pm for supper time). You can manually "pause" (i.e. disconnect) a specific device or everything. You've got granular control over what they have access to, and can blacklist specific sites.

It works via networking stuff in the background so you don't need any agents, it all just works, it's quite impressive actually.

There's even a Circle Go which I assume sets up a VPN for mobile devices so you can monitor/control even if the device is on mobile or a different wifi network.

It even has a battery backup so the kid can't just unplug it, and it'll notify you if something goes weird (i.e. getting the device off the network for example).

It's not cheap ($130), but so far I'd say it's worth the money if it keeps working as well as it has so far.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Cool device for people with families. But I also see an amazing device for pranking other people. You know that insanely frustrating feeling when your Internet won’t work? How about setting this up and pranking your wife or roommate by having their Internet intermittently stop working? Oh you want to play the first person shooter online? Well I’m going to intermittently cut out your Internet for the next two hours. And slowly drive you insane.

Or maybe you have slow Internet and you’re just tired of your roommate hogging all the bandwidth. Just lock them out for a couple hours while you watch Netflix.

[photon]

Well there is that I guess.

Though for that once we setup a transparent proxy so that all the images on websites appeared upside down.

The one thing I do notice now is the one setting it up sets up all the devices, and sets up the logging for all the devices. So the one setting it up can set it so the other people's devices don't have any restrictions, but does the same recording of activity. So you can see what sites your spouse or room mate go to.

Though I guess that was always true anyway, there are multiple ways I could do that without this device. It just makes it super easy and accessible. I guess if I trust my spouse it doesn't matter if they see what sites I go to if they really want to, and if I don't I'll be using a VPN.

(The device blocks known VPNs as well if you set it to prevent kids getting around it that way)

[psyang]

This is a timely subject - please forgive the shameless plug.

A friend of mine works for Next Step Ministries which helps rescue sexually exploited women. They just started (like last month) a new initiative called Project Safe Home, which, among other things, is promoting safe internet usage in the home for families. This involves giving away for free the Kids Wifi device - they only ask that you pay it forward, whether as a donation to the ministry, or some other means.

The main difference I can see between Kids Wifi and Circle is that Circle also handles wired connections.