[support]

The controls will not automatically turn off. Sometimes kids get smart and log on the router to turn controls off. This happened to other parents too. Maybe your router password is easily guessable (similar to your other passwords?), maybe you wrote down your password somewhere, maybe the kids are spying on you.

Next time you do a change, log out then log right back in. See if the controls remain intact.

BTW, you don’t need to use MAC address blocking to “pause” the Internet. You can use the “Pause” button on the Access Control page. Click on the button to add time to pause. Internet will resume after the pause time expires.

Or, you can double click on the “Pause” button to pause indefinitely. In this case, Internet will not resume automatically. You’ll need to log in again to manually resume.

“Pause” only pauses devices under parental control. Devices under profiles where parental control is turned off will not be affected.

[support]

@casino These are controlled by your computer. Like I said before, the logic on the router is the same irrespective of browser type, version or operation mode. In fact, it can’t tell if a browser is in incognito mode.

[support]

@casino The suspicion is these problems are related. It’s highly likely they are specific to this particular PC you are using.

[support]

@casino Previously you reported a problem very similar to this. Instead of losing safe search, you weren’t able to access some web sites, and the gravatars on pcwrt.com disappear on a periodic basis. You said “There’s a site that doesn’t work every 5 minutes”. Has that problem gone away?

There are two similarities between the problems:

1. They both occur periodically, which cannot be attributed to the router. Because there’s no timer on the router to switch the problems on and off.
2. We cannot reproduce either in our controlled test environment running Windows XP and Chrome. If there is a problem with the router and Chrome, it should be reproducible on another computer.

Please understand that the router has no knowledge whether a browser is in incognito mode or not. In fact, it doesn’t even know if a request comes from a browser or a Windows system service. Therefore, it’s impossible for the router to behave differently based on the browser mode. Considering that you are running an old system, there is possibility that some programs are running on it without your knowledge.

[support]

@casino Previously you reported that by enabling “Block Proxy, VPN and TOR”, you were sometimes blocked. Has that problem gone away? You didn’t have a safe search problem then, right?

[support]

@casino The router does not know if a browser is in incognito mode or not. Therefore, on the router, the behavior is the same either way.

The different behavior you saw originated from your browser. You may try the following to verify:

1. Disable all plugins for your Chrome and see if that keeps Safe Search in incognito mode.
2. On the router, enable “Block proxy, VPN, TOR”. You should always have safe search. Otherwise, Google & YouTube will be blocked.

[support]

@casino Does the following summarize your findings?

1. Safe search is sometimes broken on Chrome on your PC, when Chrome is in Incognito mode. There seems to be a timer that turns safe search on and off.
2. Safe search works on the same PC for the same Chrome browser, when it is not in Incognito mode.
3. Safe search works on the same PC for another browser that is not Chrome, no matter it’s in Incognito mode or not.

If the above is true, then I’d suspect that your Chrome browser is running a plugin that behaves like a VPN or proxy to evade safe search.

[support]

@casino There are two problems with this:

1. There’s a big risk of false positives. For example, “hot” is just a normal word and should not be blocked (e.g., the stove is hot). Nor should “breaststroke” be blocked for someone who wants to learn swimming.
2. For HTTPS sites, you have to break the encryption in order to filter by words (i.e., a Man in the Middle attack against HTTPS). We will not break a secure protocol to make the Internet “safer”.

[support]

@shayco2018 Thanks for the feedback. We’re looking into this.

[support]

@casino You may try to see if the same happens on a different device. If the problem is in Google or the router, then you’ll see the same behavior on the second device at exactly the same time.

Another thing you may try is to run the command ‘nslookup www.google.com’ at the time when Safe search is on and off, and compare the results.

[support]

@casino It’s not possible to list all subdomains of jezebel.com, because they can add or remove subdomains any time. What you can do is list jezebel.com first and see if the site you tried to visit is blocked. If not, add those (sub)domains to your list.

It’s a lot easier to block the domains on the router – you don’t need to worry about subdomains. Just add “jezebel.com” to the blocked list and you are covered for all subdomains also.

[support]

That should not happen. How do you know Safe Search was temporarily off and back on again?

[support]

@mbrink44 Do you mean parental control gets disabled on a periodic basis? Anything else changes at the same time? For example, WiFi password, device names?

[support]

@casino You only need 127.0.0.1 emmreport.com, not the http://… part.

But you need to list all domains and subdomains. For example, listing 127.0.0.1 jezebel.com does not make www.jezebel.com point to 127.0.0.1.

You can use ping to test, e.g., “ping jezebel.com”.

[support]

@casino These techniques cannot bypass the pcWRT controls.

[Author]

Posts