[Tutor] internet access

shawn bright nephish at gmail.com
Thu Oct 11 13:44:53 CEST 2007


i did something very similar to this. My daughter would stay on her instant
messenger (gaim) all night if i didn't. i have a cron script that checks the
hour of day, if later than x pm. does
os.system("/etc/init.d/network stop")
os.system("chmod a-x /etc/init.d/network") ( so that a reboot doesn't
override it )

then in the morning, makes it executable, and starts it up again.
Then again, this is linux and my daughter, though somewhat geeky would not
know how to beat this.
Maybe something similar could be done in windows ? I don't know much about
that OS.

sk

On 10/11/07, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> "Kirk Vander Meulen" <kvander11 at gmail.com> wrote
>
> > I'd like to write a script that limits internet access to certain
> > hours of
> > the day.  This seems like it should be simple but I'm not very
> > experienced
>
> Its actually not that simple because its fundamentally going against
> the design of the computer. Modern computers and operating systems
> are designed to allow multiple users to perform multiple tasks
> 'simultaneously' without getting in each others way. Thus it's
> relatively
> easy for an application to change its own access but much more
> difficult for an application to change a user's access and even more
> difficult for one user's application to change access for every user
> or for the machine as a whole. It's designed to be that way.
>
> Now there is one loophole, which is the administrators account
> (which is root on Linux/MacOS or nearly every user on XP!
> I dunno if Vista has closed this gaping Windows security hole or
> not?).
>
> The administrator's account should not be used for day to day
> usaage (XP defaults not withstanding) but for administewring all
> other users and the machine itself. Thus to do what you need the
> application would need to run as administrator and would need to
> tweak the operating system networking setup. Neither of these are
> particularly trivial in a well set up machine (and for good reason).
>
> So the question is, do you want to lock down a single application?
> Or a single user? Or the whole computer? And which OS are you
> using?
>
> HTH,
>
> --
> Alan Gauld
> Author of the Learn to Program web site
> http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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