How can I let the kids use Webkinz with parental controls turned on?

How can I let the kids use Webkinz with parental controls turned on?

The kids like to play Webkinz. However, I enabled "Parental Controls" on their account, mainly so that I can limit their login hours—I haven't restricted the web sites they can visit using parental controls at all. It's an iMac running Leopard (we haven't "upgraded" to Snow Leopard, and don't plan to, unless it's guaranteed to fix this problem).

Asked by: Guest | Views: 329

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Guest [Entry]

"Although the problem description is different, I found a post about a similar problem that suggested disabling the Parental Controls proxy server by removing its execute permissions. I tried it and—Webkinz is now working!

The command to do that, from a Terminal window, is

sudo chmod a-x /usr/sbin/httpd

This allows me to run Parental Controls without any web filtering, which is essentially what I want to do for now (using parental controls to limit login times). I will have to look into another solution for content filtering, as Leopard's built-in content filter is too buggy.

Looking for similar pages, I also found this article that suggested rather than disabling httpd, disable a different proxy called httpsproxyd. I haven't tried this yet (and I don't need to serve web content from this Mac right now), but it might be worth a try.

As noted in the article, one caveat is that the permissions might be reset by future system updates. If the kids start crying, I'll know where to look first.

Update

After installing Snow Leopard, the permissions on /usr/sbin/httpd were reset to be executable, but the problem seems to be gone. I guess the bug has been fixed, but I could never find the bug report, much less a description of the fix."