Is it possible to stop Parental Controls from warning about syncdefaultsd and IMRemoteURLConnection?

Question

Is it possible to stop Parental Controls from warning about syncdefaultsd and IMRemoteURLConnection?

This is driving me batty.

syncdefaultsd and IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent relentlessly cause Parental Controls to pop up a warning message about how it's being helpful in restricting these websites.

The addresses are what appear to be rolling IP addresses (https://17.151.236.38, https://17.151.236.39, etc.) I swear I try to whitelist these, but they do not ever show up in the whitelist after I've authorized it. And 100 new IPs will cycle through next time anyway, so what good is that?

The whole concept of this dialog box baffles me. I can only imagine that no one at Apple has ever used this functionality and has seen how obtrusive it is to anyone trying to work with the computer. It appears, steals focus away from whatever app is in the foreground, and then when it is dismissed, does not return focus to the window the user was using!

Is there a writedefaults command to turn this annoying box off, and usage logs I can scan for IPs to add?

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Apr 30, 2014 7:42 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Danktuft

Level 2

180 points

Jul 11, 2014 12:24 AM in response to John Vizcarra

I'm having this problem as well. If I turn on 'try to limit websites automatically' I get an endless list of IP addresses and even if I allow them the same ones seem to reappear. Browsing becomes impossible and I see this has been going on since Mountain Lion, disastrous. To get round it I have started to use OpenDNS to filter websites and give my (older) children a standard account. It's not ideal as Open DNS will try to filter any computer using the external IP and their DNS settings but you can use different DNS settings on your own computer.

Reply