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Secure Connections and Parental Controls

I have Parental Controls turned on. I have the "Try to limit acccess to adult sites automatically" option selected. And in the Customize dialog, I have a list of Allowed sites.

The problem that I'm experiencing is that when I try to connect to some secure sites, sometimes Safari complains:

Safari can’t open the page "..." because it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the server “...”.

With Amazon, it partially connects. In the Allow list, I've got all the entries I could add for Amazon, such as http://*.amazon.com, https://*.amazon.com, and (where their secure images seem to come from) https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com.

However, the secure connection breaks down somewhere and I get a partial page with a lot of broken images. It is hard to click on a button when the image for it is missing.

To troubleshoot this problem, I turned off Parental Controls, and Amazon.com works great on a secure connection. Then, to rule out the possibility that my login is corrupt, I created a brand-new user account and it has the same problem with Amazon once I turn on the Parental Controls.

Amazon is just one example of this problem. I see it on other sites when I try to get to a secure page. But in all cases the problem seems to have to do with some component that is not working when a secure connection (HTTPS) and Parental Controls are both involved.

I've tried looking through all the system logs with no luck. I don't see any clues there. I even tried running tcpdump from the terminal to grab all the packet data, but I don't see anything obvious there either.

I like the filtering that Parental Controls provides. So what I really want to do is find a way to solve the conflict between HTTPS and Parental Controls.

The error that Safari gives is similar to the error given when an SSL certificate has expired. So maybe Parental Controls is somehow blocking a certificate from being validated and breaking the validation chain?

Thanks for reading this far,
JDetwiler

iMac Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Jul 19, 2008 7:35 AM

Reply
60 replies

Jul 26, 2008 3:08 PM in response to James Detwiler

I have the same problem. I cannot access the citibank account online website with parental controls turned on with the "Try to limit access to adult websites automatically" setting. It doesnt tell me that I am trying to access an unauthorized site or anything. It will just not open the page. I am trying to access the citibank site at https://www.citibank.com/us/cards/index.htm. I have created an exception for every single combination of this website in the Authorized Sites list but no luck.

Jul 29, 2008 4:20 PM in response to James Detwiler

I am having same problem on new iMac I just purchased last night. I created a managed user, turned on parental controls, even changed setting to allow all websites, but I was having trouble with Gmail in Firefox when emptying my spam folder. However, the Admin user did not have the same trouble with Gmail in Firefox. Switched back to the managed user, same problems with Gmail in Firefox. It is not a problem logging into Gmail, but rather emptying the Spam folder once in Gmail, among some other issues. Gmail in the Firefox browser kept getting an error code (error 707 I think). I don't think it was an issue with Safari (although I did not test Safari much as I am familiar with and like Firefox).

Another post in the Apple Discussions area shows people having similar trouble with accessing the iTunes Store when Parental Controls are turned on.

Based on these posts, the problem seems to be happening in a number of websites even if the parental controls are set to allow all websites.

Note to Apple: Please help!!!

Jul 29, 2008 4:57 PM in response to johnv6

I have this problem with several sites, one in particular is Google. My daughter is unable to access her gmail account. I have it allowed, but Safari blocks it because of the parental control. I then have to allow my daughter access to my account to get to her gmail. Well, doesn't that just defeat the purpose of parental controls since my account can access everything.

Sep 19, 2008 8:12 PM in response to James Detwiler

I have a similar problem. The problem is that I cannot access any website from any browser or iTunes store from an account with parental controls enabled. This happened all of the sudden. It was working as expected and then suddenly the accounts with parental controls enabled could not access the internet from any browser.

If I turn off parental controls, you can browse the pages just fine or access iTunes store.

I can send and receive email with parental controls on.

I have created a new managed account and it has the same problem.

Does anyone have any idea what to do to resolve this?

Sep 20, 2008 7:05 AM in response to lefty11

I have similar problems. Just bought at brand new iMac. Set up a Guest Account, used Parental Controls to limit Adult sites and on Yahoo.com, when I select Mail Safari shows up the following message.
Safari can’t open the page “ http://www.yahoo.com/r/m2” because it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the server “www.yahoo.com”.
I've tried clearing caches and many other suggestions seen on these discussion forums, but too no avail. Help pls

Sep 20, 2008 4:02 PM in response to James Detwiler

Like everyone else who's posted, I have problems with Parental Controls and secure websites. I have an iMac with OS X 10.5.5. I tried calling Applecare Support today, but they were unable to resolve the issue.

If I enable Parental Controls, that account is unable to access any secure site, giving the same error reported here "couldn't establish a secure connection to the server". If I disable Parental Controls for the account, the accounts have no problems.

I'm posting in hopes that Apple will escalate the issue with their engineers if enough of us are squawking on the support forums.

--Tim

Sep 22, 2008 7:17 AM in response to James Detwiler

We are having the same issue here at the university. None of our iMacs will access our student https portal when restrictions are placed on web browsing. It's happening with 3 different browsers, too. I have called Apple and talked to three different T2 folks. They have been very nice and helpful, but had no solution. The case has now been escalated to engineering. I can only hope they can figure it out.

Oct 4, 2008 3:16 AM in response to martinpaul

This is very frustrating and annoying. My son has a similar problem accessing the internet at his school. The secure connection keeps getting blocked by Parental Controls. I have tried every combination of allowable addresses I can think of, but to know avail. It works fine when access to all sites is allowed.

Apple support and other information provided in these discussions has been informative but has not solved the problem.

Apple should supply support for this application instead of ignoring these issues.

Secure Connections and Parental Controls

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