My wife has decided to get the kids a set of android tablets for christmas. These are Coby Kyros 4GB wi-fi only models. The kids are ages 6-10 so I don’t particularly want to let them have free reign of the internet or the app stores. I also want to make sure the tablets are protected from the various forms of malware.
Ideally I would like to be able to establish a white list for the websites they are allowed to visit, and make it so that they are not able to add any apps or modify the white list without parental intervention. However I am not familiar enough with the android platform to know where to start on any of this.
Google has helped me find out that apps exist which claim to be able to restrict access to other apps, but almost all of them have comments indicating that they are very easy to bypass. Likewise I have been seeing mixed reviews as to the effectiveness and value of the antivirus options that are out there. So far I have not been able to find anything about building a whitelist, or restricting content accessible from the web.
So I am asking for suggestions as to specific topics/apps that I should be reading up on, and/or other approaches that I can take to reach these goals.
EDIT: I should note that this model does not come with the android market pre installed, it has some third party app store on it. It does come with an apk manager installed, and I have played with one of them enough to get the market and gmail onto it. So I should be able to get most anything installed/removed if I can figgure out what it is I actually need to do.
Answer
As I noted in your other thread, your best bet is probably to manually set a web proxy server via the devices network settings that filters by keyword or whitelists. Even if they do go to another person's house or try to get on another network, they will be unable to browse (especially if you are hosting the proxy server yourself on your own network; in that case, they most likely won't be able to browse to anything at all).
From wikipedia:
In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server. The proxy server evaluates the request according to its filtering rules. For example, it may filter traffic by IP address or protocol. If the request is validated by the filter, the proxy provides the resource by connecting to the relevant server and requesting the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may optionally alter the client's request or the server's response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. In this case, it 'caches' responses from the remote server, and returns subsequent requests for the same content directly.
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