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Parental Controls not working

Roiseal — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 22:31:34 GMT

My wife and I have successfully used the BT App to control the internet access for our teenage son, especially at night.

However, he has discovered a hack, where he can create a duplicate of his ip address and connect to the wi-fi. No end of parental discipline has had any effect. I won't go into details of his hidden disability but taking away his PC is not the answer.

The only solution I can see is unplugging and hiding the BT hub overnight but this is a pain to remember to connect it each morning.

The old fashioned Access Control in hub settings was brilliant as you could switch off all wi-fi at source rather than individual settings for each device.

Any other solutions?

Re: Parental Controls not working

Crimliar — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 08:31:58 GMT

Things to try - no guarantees!

I presume the router has a "MAC Filter capability" - add all the devices you want to have access to the router to an enable list and turn this on. This will stop him from using a randomised MAC to get around the filter. You'll probably have to set his devices back to using their standard MAC addresses.

However, my understanding is that BT parental filtering is based on its DNS servers. Guess what, all you have to do is change the DNS servers to say Google, Cloudflare, or similar and you are back to square one. You then end up in the realm of needing a third-party router that catches DNS requests and diverts them to the servers you want to use.

I guess my final comment is that you have to be sensible about this stuff. There's no magic wand to fix this, and the internet is a terrible babysitter (for want of a better phrase).

Re: Parental Controls not working

Roiseal — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 12:24:34 GMT

Thanks but mac filtering only available on BT business hub. Think we are back at removing hub at night.