Show HN: I've built a child monitoring app with mitmproxy and WireGuard (parentcontrols.win)
The structure of the service is pretty technically interesting. It sets up a wireguard VPN on the child's Windows account, and then routes the traffic to our server. From there, we use mitmproxy to break open the TLS, inspect the packets, and then re-encrypt them. Currently all images are passed through an ImageNetV2 model, and for sites like reddit or google, individual links/communities are analyzed and we remove the content if it violates the filters without impacting the overall browsing experience. Coming soon(ish) will be a 8B uncensored llama3 model, which will allow parents to create custom filters for filtering content.
I've always felt like child monitoring systems are missing the bigger picture when it comes to content filtering. I certainly remember being a little kid (9-ish) and coming across adult content I shouldn't have been seeing, but I also recall encountering subreddits and other online groups that laid the groundwork for my personality, without my parent ever knowing what was happening. The fact that as a child, I declared I no longer believed in God before I stopped believing in Santa was not the result of being some super genius, but because I was regurgitating what I read on r/atheism as gospel. Parents need more control over what their kids see, and as the internet develops more mature communities child filters need to keep up. It is not enough to simply hope your kid turns out normal, because there are companies actively working against you.
The service is $20 a month, although it's 50% off for the first two months while we're in early access. We also only do Windows at the moment, although I'd like to expand (especially to linux) later this year.
Let me know what you think!
21 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadObviously not everyone agrees, so perhaps you'll have happy customers. If I ever meet their victims I will take great delight in teaching them how to fix their routing and avoid your service.
Good luck finding better uses for your abilities.
Because it's evil. With a capital E.
And you will be glad to help people affected to stop it.
...
Interesting.
...and you are now one of those companies.
Be careful, thee who would fight monsters, that you not in the end become that which you hate. For just as you stare into the abyss, the abyss dost stare back into you.
Your children must learn to navigate the world as it is. It's on you, not to shield them from the truth, but to nurture them such that they can make those decisions on their own.
If you fear that you were so easily influenced into this course of action by the conspiring of others, the answer then is to share that with them so they need not walk the same path you walked. Instead, you're doing just what all those schemers you fear have done. Placed yourself transparently into the stream of of an exploring mind with the intent to shape it and mold it as you wilt; instead of providing them the tools of the sculptor, and letting them hew themselves out of the rough with the benefit of your life experience as a template.
Not to belabor the point, but it is unambiguously disgusting, and evil to me; and I'm not one who is known to quickly pass judgement on such things. This one is from the start pretty obvious though. I have heard that my point of view would be different were I to sire children of my own; but I figure the active role I play in many youngster's lives gives me enough exposure to the subject matter area to know I most assuredly would not change in that regard; any child entering my custody is treated as my own flesh and blood.
You likely haven't put enough thought into alternative use cases you enable, and the harm that can be done. Nor have you likely done any work creating a way of knowing whether or how it is being abused. Like by an abusive or controlling spouse, or other such thing. Really think about that aspect; because the same people you're making this available to are the same people who had hands in "manipulating" you in the first place.
Burn it. Destroy it, and be done. I've had to get similarly destructive ideas out of my head before. Some things just don't deserve to see the light of day. This would be one. If you really must make it, then suffer it only to exist as a concession to your own convictionsDon't just put it out there. Part of the journey of mking such a thing is hopefully the gaining of enough wisdom to recognize it is not the right time for such a thing.
I beg you, do not persist making something so likely to turn into something you'll ultimately regret.
You feel that you needed to be protected from the bad old world by you parents. Who you now wish had more control over you. You bad bad boy!
Children, believe or or not, are very good at discerning what is right and wrong.
No longer believing in god is a good thing. Santa claus is and always has been a lie.
What is wrong with Atheism? I'm an athiest.
It seems like you want to take away choice from children.
Children are monitored far too much these days and you want to make it worse so you can make a few quid
Get some therapy before you start taking it out on the kids.
Muppet!
r/atheism is just a personal anecdote, as the future of the product will be infinity granular filters using LLM's. It's not that I'm personally opposed to atheism, it's that I became one before I stopped believing in Santa as a result of online communities. Every day, children who have no idea what they're talking about decide they're a Nazi or Socialist because they saw a meme online, and it's neither healthy for the child or good for our society to have this. The central premise, that many online communities aren't suitable for kids stands true, and I'm sure there are topics which you would be highly opposed to your six year old child viewing and incorporating into their personality if you thought about it.
One of the big features I’m working on now though is self-descriptive filters, so a patent can input exactly what kind of stuff they do and don’t want, without us getting in the way, and an LLM will choose which posts are and aren’t filtered out. It’ll hopefully resolve this sort of discrepancy between what we want to filter out and what parents actually want filtered out.
I appreciate your post because it demonstrates why there is a potential need for more robust safety systems (policy, people, technology) against certain parental cohorts. For sure, there is substantial harm to be found in online content and it’s a very hard job overseeing access children might have to the greater Internet. But also, similar harm potentially within the home (depending on the home). This is a technical attempt at solving for a people problem.
Children also believe all sorts of stuff simply because their parents told them so. That doesn't seem healthy for the children or society either, especially if they can no longer look at opposing viewpoints because of evil 'products' like this.
This will break anything that does certificate pinning like Spotify. As crapware tls proxies become more common, cert pinning and data encrypted before it’s sent will become more common.
This won’t work on fb and their related properties or iMessage where I assume kids spend a lot of time now? No idea about TikTok but if they’re not cert pinning yet… they should be!
The other big concern with our LLM (at least in my opinion) is that it's not fast enough. Decrypting each post, sending to our LLM with a gRPC call, and then getting the response back just takes too long. It's certainly going to be possible to do, but I need to launch and start getting customers before I can properly tackle that problem.
Also we add a root certificate to the host machine, which is how we get around HSTS. It's also why we don't have a phone client yet, as it's much harder to add root certificates to an iPhone than it is to add them to a windows or linux machine.
I will say though I also got around three different child monitoring systems when I was a kid lol. Unfortunately the prize was a porn addiction.
You've cherry picked your own beliefs and inserted / removed them along the way.
This is disgusting
Instead of focusing on teaching children robust strategies for dealing with the Real World, you're advocating for inserting some interposing technology to achieve this ill-defined goal, namely that "your kid turns out normal".
Tech is often unfairly littered with the graves of bright ideas that were ahead of their time, or didn't happen to catch on, but there's also a large population of deservedly dead ideas that keep trying to solve deeply human problems by blindly substituting technology -- and this is firmly in this latter camp.
I wish you (as a human) no ill-will, and I hope you will build different solutions in future, which marry human strengths with technology, instead of bypassing them via black boxes.