Goal
Children’s safety in the online worldOverview
It's known that 5.43 million young people in the UK alone have experienced cyber-bullying. What a child sees and experiences online cannot be unseen! Paul and Johanna were right to assume that they need the help of IT partner to produce this project. Zfort Group took part in development of an easy-to-use tool that can help parents to make their children’s browsing experience safer
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Paul Ford
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Johanna Ford
Client
Paul and Johanna Ford are co-founders of Edge IT Ltd with more than 40 years’ experience in the IT Industry. After having a young family of their own, they started developing an easy-to-use tool that can help parents and carers to manage their children’s online world
Problem
We need a service that gives parents quick and easy access to their children’s activity (via a dashboard) while allowing children to explore the Internet in a safe and protected way
Solution
Zfort Group began with the analysis of changing requirements and then created 3 different project
versions.
Initially, we developed a proxy server with the ability to control and block Internet traffic.
Then
the development team also added time and volume restrictions. Later, iOS application was
implemented
to make installation and configuration of network services on iPhones and iPads easier.
Now iNet Guardian works by proxying the traffic from the device to the iNet Guardian cloud service that blocks any inappropriate traffic.
iNet Guardian allows parents and carers to have informed and practical discussions with their children, leading to a safer and more educational online experience
Key Points
- Processing of HTTPS (encrypted) traffic, which is computationally expensive
- Large amount of user and connections
Challenge
We had to create a scalable pool of on-demand proxy servers and find a good balance between number of active users and number of nodes running simultaneously
Key Features
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Supports Multiple Devices
The solution is compatible with iOS, Android, Windows, and Kindle devices -
Dashboard Usage
Shows the top 10 sites visited, amount of time spent on those sites, top 10 sites blocked sites, amount of bandwidth consumed and can be filtered per user basis for the last day, week and month -
Limit Device Bandwidth Utilization
The amount of data that the device downloads can be limited. This is particularly useful for households who pay for a set amount of data usage a month -
Device Access Times
Configure the device as you wish. For example, it can only connect to the Internet for certain periods of the day such as between 4 PM and 6 PM. Also, you can create limitations, and the device will have access to the Internet only for a certain period of time in 24 hours, like 2 hours per day -
Block Inappropriate Content
Configure the device as you wish. For example, it can only connect to the Internet for certain periods of the day such as between 4 PM and 6 PM. Also, you can create limitations, and the device will have access to the Internet only for a certain period of time in 24 hours, like 2 hours per day -
Visited Websites
Check reports about visited websites and how long your child has been on these websites
Technologies
Most of the functionality is implemented with PHP framework Yii2. The proxy components are implemented with usage of Node.js and Python (because of huge number of concurrent connections and the need to process a lot of data simultaneously). StrongSwan, an open source IPsec-based VPN solution, was used to setup connections. Application for iOS platform was made using SwiftOur Roles
- 1 Python Developer
- 1 PHP/Yii Developer
- 1 Front End Developer
- 1 iOS Developer
- 1 Quality Assurance Engineer
- 1 Project Manager
- 1 DevOps
