Anybody who has iOS 5

[Silofolous]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

For those who have iOS 5 and can thus answer my question, is it possible to block specific websites in Safari? Alternative browsers, jailbreaking, and flat-out removing Safari via the restrictions won't cut it, and I have a little bit of hope that the parental controls have been updated.

 

[soco]

Just took a poke around the settings and whatnot, I don't see anything like that.

Really interesting though. I guess you'd need to still do it through your ISP or router settings. Although I get the need for that sort of control out of the house.

 

[Silofolous]

Thanks anyway. And thank you for the intelligent reply, I hate reading nothing but "Just don't go to ______ website", or parental advice. Nice to see someone actually answer a question for once lol.

 

[soco]

Thanks anyway. And thank you for the intelligent reply, I hate reading nothing but "Just don't go to ______ website", or parental advice. Nice to see someone actually answer a question for once lol.

I do what I can.

I wonder if the carriers allow any sort of control like this. Did you try calling them?

 

[Silofolous]

I do what I can.

I wonder if the carriers allow any sort of control like this. Did you try calling them?

Hmm, I never thought of that. I'll give it a shot, thanks.

 

[jplusc]

I did a quick search since I figured this could be a common concern.

What about flat out disabling Safari and installing a kid safe browser? Not sure if it would meet your exact needs but I found one all Mobicip (i just googled it). Just a thought. I'm not sure if it allows site specific blocking, but if you are more content focused vs. site specific it might work...

sorry, just noticed you noted no alternative browsers. Disregard.

 

[Fry-man22]

Have to jailbreak - but you could use the hosts file

I hope this isn't one of the replies you take as unhelpful, but if you are willing to jailbreak and you always want to block the same set of sites you can just edit the hosts file on the iPhone. Just redirect any of those sites back to 74.125.225.48 (Google.com) or even 127.0.0.1

Anything you put in there will be impossible to reach unless they ping the site and go to it directly. If they don't know the method being used to block them then finding the solution could be inconvenient enough to have the intended effect.

You just enter the IP you want to go to followed by a space and then the the site address

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
127.0.0.1 BadSiteIWantToBlock.com

 

[honeytoast]

Depending on your modem you might be able to block certain sites from the web interface.

If your ISP doesn't provide those settings then you can sign up for a free account from www.opendns.com. This allows custom domain filtering or you can choose from 1 of 4 levels of default blocking.

 

[janitorC7]

Depending on your modem you might be able to block certain sites from the web interface.

If your ISP doesn't provide those settings then you can sign up for a free account from www.opendns.com. This allows custom domain filtering or you can choose from 1 of 4 levels of default blocking.

Actually OpenDNS is a good idea. I don't believe that the iPhone allows you to set-up a custom DNS server… at least not without a jailbreak. However, I’m pretty sure that the jailbreak community has a way of doing this. I’ll see if I can find anything…

Aside from that I honestly think that the best bet is to use a 3rd party browser that has parental controls and just block safari

JC7