

Show HN: Securly - Keep your kids safe on your home network - bmadhu

http://www.securly.com<p>To keep kids safe online, we felt it wasn’t enough anymore to rely simply on blocking websites (domain filtering). We also need to protect them on trusted social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. We couldn’t find any solution that does this for the entire home network. We are two security hackers who have worked in the enterprise firewall space for several years and felt this was an important problem to solve.<p>The video on our front page gives you a pretty good idea of what we do. You can also use us as a free premium DNS server by pointing your DNS to the IPs here:<p>http://www.securly.com/setup<p>We would love some honest feedback on what we have built so far.
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ja27
It sounds decent (but would still like more detail about how it content
filters with DNS). But my concern would be that the average potential customer
isn't willing or able to go change their DNS settings. A lot of parents we
know don't even know their router password anymore.

I think there's an untapped gold mine there for the first company that comes
out with an idiot-proof content filtering system for parents and gets in into
Walmart, Staples, Best Buy, etc. I'm thinking either a replacement wireless
router or a wired filter that goes between their current wifi router and
broadband modem. It's got to do as much auto configuration as possible. Or if
Verizon or other broadband providers would just offer it as part of their
service package. For another $19.95 a month they'll proxy filter your internet
content.

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bmadhu
When it comes to websites that require content inspection, we resolve the DNS
requests to a web proxy which does the content filtering.

To get around the issue of the average consumer not being able to change their
DNS settings, we are working on an application that will automate (login to
router, change DNS) configuration. Our intent is to cover the top routers in
the market which we believe will make it easier than ever for people to use
Securly.

Incidentally, we started off with the hardware box idea and moved towards a
cloud based approach because (1) its much harder for a startup to manage the
complexity of being hardware based (2) users have to spend money upfront to
try us out (3) investors tend to be hardware-averse. To our knowledge, a
hardware box does not provide any significant advantage over the cloud based
service that we have come up with.

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cliffcrosland
My family uses the SafeEyes filter on each machine, but I think this is a much
more interesting approach as it helps tackle filtering for kids' smartphones
as well.

One small piece of feedback: Could you give a little bit more info on how to
set up the two DNS servers? Perhaps an example or some links to walkthroughs
for popular routers?

~~~
bmadhu
Thanks Cliff. Yes, SafeEyes (we are ex McAfee as well) and similar software
based solutions are painful to manage across devices. We are already working
towards addressing the DNS setting issue by not only providing instructions on
our site but also coming up with an application that automatically configures
the wireless routers. We believe this will make it easier than ever for people
to use Securly.

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pdenya
That video is OK. I'd rather see a plain text description of what it is
exactly that you're blocking or not blocking.

~~~
JamesBell
2nd that. Needs FAQ.

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bmadhu
Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of revamping our website to
include FAQ -- but we felt like we could get away with launching on HN without
it given the high density of early adopters here.

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ishake
I'd assume that not all parents would be able to set this up. A simplified
step by step may help. A PDF or video should work.

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abstractbill
The securely guys demoed their technology for me a while back - it is _very_
impressive. Congrats guys!

~~~
bmadhu
Thanks for all the support, Bill! Really appreciate it.

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mitrick2
how do you all differentiate from OpenDNS's family config? I've used that with
pretty good success so far, but always open to improvements.

~~~
bmadhu
Our key differentiators are (1) Being able to filter inappropriate content on
trusted websites (Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc) that children use
frequently. Domain based blocking allows or denies the entire website. But
cannot for example, filter out a "bad" page on Wikipedia without blocking the
entire domain (2) Being able to provide easy parental access. Parents login to
Securly via our website and immediately get unfiltered Internet access.

~~~
tjlytle
Would be interested in knowing how you're doing the content filtering.
Returning a filtering proxy server in place of the actual server?

~~~
bmadhu
Correct. But only for the sites that are known to have content that might be
age inappropriate.

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bashzor
In general, I am a hugely pro-choice. If the kids think they are up for that
kind of websites, let them be. The odds that they see something they'd rather
not have seen are a thousand to one. Sure, not impossible and there will be
plenty of stories, but it's not worth it to censor the internet like this.

Better talk with your children what the dangers are. Tell them how burglars
find that you are on holidays and then break in, or how your Facebook images
could be abused by that bully to make you look stupid. It'll make them be more
careful, and you needn't use securly to block Facebook's photo upload feature.
And yeah, you can also take the lead on talking about sex, better to have them
hear it from a trusted source first hand. (I appreciated my mom's effort to
raise me, let's say, aware of how stuff works.)

Also, _asking_ people to do something rather than demanding or prohibiting,
works always better[1]. If you tell your kids they shouldn't do something,
they're more likely to experiment but decide it's better not to, than when you
prohibit it and they're going to try and find holes. And believe me, try they
will, often either finding a way or having someone fix it for them.

Lastly, I know someone who had this kind of block on his pc. Dutch kids, and I
guess any, aren't frugal about swear words like "fuck". The kid who had this
filter installed couldn't see a significant part of the forum since it blocks
the entire page over that word, and he missed parts of discussions and
conversations. Then someone tried to be funny and simply put "fuck" in 1pt
white text in his signature, almost entirely blocking him from the forum. In
the end of course, he found a way around the block. There are always ways.

I know this is your business and you're not going to stop for this kind of
personal morals, but I wanted this to be out there. It's certainly nothing
personal!

[1] <http://lesswrong.com/lw/4e/cached_selves/> 9th paragraph.

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bmadhu
Your feedback is well taken. A couple of things (1) Based on our experience,
we ran into a lot of empirical evidence that parents don't take the lead in
talking to their kids about what they might run into on the Internet (2) The
pro-choice argument works well for teens who are well aware of whats out
there. Our intent is to protect younger children who might be accidentally
exposed to adult content before their parents have had a chance to talk to
them about it (or are too young to visit these sites even after such a
discussion). Incidentally, the trigger for this idea was when my co-founder
saw his 6-year old cousin accidentally viewing an age-inappropriate video on
YouTube on an iPad while his parents were away. That's when we looked for
solutions for "safe YouTube" out there and were surprised to see how sorry the
parental "control" solutions out there were.

~~~
gadders
This is definitely needed. My six year old has a tablet and I dread the day
she sees something "rude" on the internet.

