Parental Control Squid
Dependencies:
- any *nix OS
- squid forward proxy (local or remote)
- python3 (all native library)
- bash (not
sh-- optional for keeping the list sorted viasortlist.sh)
This is a python script that I wrote in order to help keep an eye on my kids. They are young, but they have their own computers, and I'm not very fond of commercial spyware, so I decided to roll my own.
The script is compatible with any local or remote host running Squid forward proxy that you want to monitor for URL content. Setting up Squid is beyond the scope of this guide, so please feel free to Google that on your own.
Basically, I have both of my kid's WiFi MAC addresses in a LAN NAT rule that forwards all outgoing HTTP/HTTPS traffic to my squid forward proxy.
I found a list of really bad words (some not necessarily bad, but stuff that my wife and I would want to know about if they were interested in finding out about).
I have the script running on my management server via cronjob every hour, and if it finds any interesting traffic from the kids' laptops, it will send a text to my wife and myself.
The wordlist is not exhaustive, and I have removed numerous terms that caused false positives, but it seems to work very well.
sortlist.sh
This is a bash script used for adding and removing terms from wordlist.txt, while at the same time, keeping that file deduplicated and organized.
Examples:
Remove weed from wordlist.txt because it causes a false positive for seaweed flavored pringles:
./sortlist.sh -d weed
Remove puss, butt, and pee from wordlist.txt because of false positives containing button, shopee, and a weird Dragonball Z URL -- additionally, we will remove gspot, because of false positives from blogspot.com:
./sortlist.sh -d puss butt pee gspot
Let's not let ourselves get too comfortable, let's go ahead and add a few more specific/explicit entries:
./sortlist -a pussy pussies butts peeing g-spot
Running the main script:
Simply run ./parental_control.py, and everything will work smoothly, as long as you have the config.ini populated correctly.
Alternately, if you are testing some things and don't want email/texts to be sent, you can also run ./parental_control.py -noemail.
Details:
This should run on pretty much any OS except for Windows.
If you have any questions, please feel free to submit an issue.