26 October 2008 @ 9:34Disable the Parental Controls Content Filter

If you’re like me, you use Leopard’s Parental Controls just for their Time Limits feature and nothing else. If I need to block a domain, I can do it from my router or modify the hosts file on the computer in question.

Unfortunately, even if you have checked the “Allow unrestricted access to websites” option, all web traffic for the managed account still flows through Leopard’s built-in proxy. This can slow down the managed user’s web browsing as well as make it impossible to log into some websites.

The solution? Prevent the httpsproxyd from running. A hint at macosxhints.com suggested disabling httpd, but this could be a problem for anyone trying to serve web pages from this computer. My solution should not affect any process other than the content filtering.

To prevent the httpsproxyd from running, enter the following command in the Terminal. You must be logged in as a user with administrator privileges to run this command.

sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FamilyControls.framework/Versions/A/Resources/httpsproxyd

What this does is makes the httpsproxyd binary non-executable by all users.

Now your managed users (kids?) should be able to browse “The Real Internet” instead of a somewhat broken internet.

Note: This changed could be overwritten by software updates or by repairing permissions, but I have not verified this. If this is the case, the above command just needs to be run again.

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Comments:

  1. Peter B | 10 Aug 2011 @ 23:50 #

    Thanks for the hint. In Lion I had to change this to sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FamilyControls.framework/Versions/A/Resources/webfilterctl as the file “httpsproxyd” was not there.

  2. Jon C | 23 Oct 2011 @ 10:22 #

    Great post. I was tearing my hair out wondering why my squid proxy wasn’t getting hit from my managed accounts. Followed Peter B’s advice for Lion and everything is back to normal.

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