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up vote 6 down vote favorite

My daughter is addicted to this site, and this is having an adverse impact on her studies.

What methods are there to prevent her accessing Facebook in Google Chrome?

Kindly help

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2  
Not sure why this would be voted down? In a more general sense... there can be other valid reasons to block specific websites. – w3d Jul 31 '10 at 18:47
7  
Maybe his daughter is voting him down. – hyperslug Jul 31 '10 at 20:56
communication is much more useful than a block action. probably all her friends are using Facebook, if you block it, she will be extremely unhappy. – Shivan Raptor Aug 1 '10 at 8:48

3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

If talking to her fails...

I'm not sure how to do this specifically in Google Chrome. There might be an extension that can be installed that will block specified sites (which would obviously need to be password protected to prevent it being bypassed).

But if you were to block Chrome, what is stopping another browser being used?

You could block a specific website on the WHOLE PC by editing the Windows HOSTS file. You can then direct all requests to facebook.com to an alternative IP Address (eg. 127.0.0.1 - localhost - in other words nowhere!). Although depending how tech savvy your daughter is this can be changed back!

To block facebook.com (and other social networking sites) on your ENTIRE NETWORK you can change the DNS settings in your router to use an alternative, such as OpenDNS. If you then sign up to OpenDNS you can then block all sorts of websites by category. This is probably the most secure way if you are accessing the internet through a router as you can password protect the routers control panel to prevent changes to the DNS.

You might consider allowing access to facebook at certain times of the day (a healthy compromise?), which I think OpenDNS might allow you to do as well?

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localhost is not nowhere… you could perfectly install a web server on your local machine, listening on port 80, and have every URL redirect to a static page saying Hi, Facebook has been suspended until you get a life back. (or a fake Facebook page telling account has been suspended because it was suspected to be a bot due to abnormally huge activity) – Benoit Feb 12 '12 at 19:54
@Benoit Well, if you block it one of the ways mentioned here (in w3d's answer), she could simply use a proxy and it would work for any of these methods. Plus if you block the DNS, she could simply add an entry for Facebook in the hosts file, circumventing the DNS block. I believe a good way would be to block it in the hosts file and denying her write-access to that file. You could add some proxy sites to the file as well, just to be safer. – the.midget Feb 12 '12 at 20:31
@the.midget: If the daughter has a non-admin Windows account, there is no way she might edit the hosts file. – Benoit Feb 12 '12 at 20:47
@Benoit Well, that's the way to go, then! Isn't it? – the.midget Feb 12 '12 at 21:41
@Benoit localhost is nowhere on the public internet - that is what I meant. – w3d Feb 13 '12 at 18:27
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up vote 1 down vote

You can install BlockIt, which is a plugin designed for Chrome that allows you block certain domains.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dfjfhdfdeogiplgepcbfjcpiianmeoed

Install it, create a password and then add Facebook to the list of domain names to block.

To unblock it, use your password to login to the BlockIt interface and allow it again.

You can also add a custom message that will appear whenever someone tries to access a blocked domain, maybe telling her to stop wasting her time on Facebook and get some homework done!

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up vote 0 down vote

Usually you can do this in your router if there is a firewall (blocking the traffic incoming AND outgoing from/to the IPs). Usually you can also select which internal IPs are blocked for outgoing so you could block only her computer from accessing the site. Be sure to assign always the same IP to her (using MAC address in DHCP). Anyways, nothing (except removing her ethernet cable :) ) is a 100% solution as she always can use a proxy to access what she wants... You can also install a proxy and monitor/block traffic based on IPs and keywords and block all the proxies you can and update the list regularly but... this is a lot of work, not 100% secure, not really a solution for a home and I think a serious talk or a few talks and maybe some small threats about removing all internet access should solve the problem better because she probably have friends with computers too... so even if you succeed, she will find a way to access anyways.

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