Mac OS X Parental Controls https:// issu

T

theperson34

Registered
I have parental controls set up on my kid's account, and I have made it so the parental controls filtering is set to allow them to sites, but have safari filter them. This disables access to https:// sites such as Gmail, Facebook, etc.

I have changed that to unrestricted access, and it still happens. It did not happen before, when unrestricted access was selected before I made it filtered. I have searched and searched many other sites, but I was wondering if there was a way to simply reset the Parental Controls, and just start over with new Parental Control settings, or find a way to allow https:// sites.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
Try to forget the Parent controls for a second and think about OpenDNS.com and open a free account. They have a instructional video to show you how you can use DNS that you control and 99% of kids will ever know it is there because most kids know nothing of DNS. Plus this will not slow down you system and may even speed up your browsing.
 
That would not be a bad idea, but I also want to set the time limits and application limits, and I would prefer not to use any other system other than the one that is already built in, so if there is a way to fix it, I would much rather do that, than get another parental control app
 
I had this SAME problem and have been trying to deal with it for almost 2 years and I only just now solved it. I hope this is still useful to you.

I gave my son administrative privileges. This disables parental controls. Then when I made his account normal again, I was able to add https sites to his allowed sites and everything appears to be working fine.

BEFORE YOU DO THIS: all of his customized list of allowed and blocked sites was erased by this process (oddly, the Parental Controls log of blocked and visited websites was left intact) so you will be starting from scratch on that.

A side comment: I found it very confusing that when parental controls blocked https access it does not send the browser the typical parental controls prompt me to allow that site. Instead it simply blocks the connection and the browser reports an error. It took some digging to learn that parental controls will block encrypted pages automatically because it can't screen them. I spent a long time (2 years!!) thinking there was something else wrong.
 
Last edited:
As a new Mac user, I was trying to allow my son access to his recently established Google mail account and ran into the "parental controls / https" problem. From trying to find a solution in various internet forums, this appears to be a long standing issue and there appears to have been no "reasonable" (i.e. without resorting to other programs) answers to date. I've tried to implement the solution proposed by OriEri but still run into the same problem, perhaps because I'm doing something in the wrong order or from the wrong account? Would it be possible to post a more detailed (step-by-step) solution description in the fashion of an "idiot's guide to..."?

Thanks
 
So, I did a little more exploring on the Mac and found another solution. Simply using the Mail program (I just entered in the Google gmail address and password) allows one to bypass the parental controls even when accessing the https site. I hope this helps others.
 
I too found that you can just use the mail program to access the gmail when using parental controls...

Anyone figure out how to allow access to google docs while using parental controls? I have tried to add the https exception...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top