Discrete Remote Screen View

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I know the title gives off shady vibes at first glance, but hear me out.

I started homeschooling my kids this year; and my oldest has been difficult in getting him to do his homework ethically. After thinking about the issue, I remembered that as a kid (back when apple had those fruity colored PC's put into most every school), our Computer Lab teacher had a fairly discrete remote viewing software that allowed her to remotely view our screen from hers. If I recall, the only indicator that she was watching your screen were two little eyeballs on the system tray.

So I did some googling. I already use Teamviewer, but it's a bit obvious when the side panel dashes out upon connection. So I'm looking for a more discrete method of remote viewing my boy's screen to ensure he's doing his homework honorably instead of cheating by utilizing the web. ( While I give him kudos for resourcefulness, contrary to modern belief, google and chatgpt aren't going to educate one).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I may go about this? Or what my options may be? I appreciate any sincere suggestions.

Have a great evening everybody.
 


Instead of trying to see his screen and possibly giving away your intent, you could,
1) ssh in and set the routing table to point only to the inside network. Have two routing tabes, one for schooling and one for play. A script could be written to switch them back an forth.
2) If you want to see if he can get to the internet, you can do a tcpdump.
It would be something like this:
tcpdump -qnni eth0 ip and src net 192.168.0.0/16 and not dst net 192.168.0.0/16 and \(port 80 or port 443\)
Note: your network interfaces & network may be different.
You can find where the traffic goes by doing a host x.x.x.x (External IP address) or whois x.x.x.x (External IP addres) the latter gives way more info, not much of it useful for what your looking for, but times. the host command doesn't give a hostname.
 
Instead of trying to see his screen and possibly giving away your intent, you could,
1) ssh in and set the routing table to point only to the inside network. Have two routing tabes, one for schooling and one for play. A script could be written to switch them back an forth.
2) If you want to see if he can get to the internet, you can do a tcpdump.
It would be something like this:
tcpdump -qnni eth0 ip and src net 192.168.0.0/16 and not dst net 192.168.0.0/16 and \(port 80 or port 443\)
Note: your network interfaces & network may be different.
You can find where the traffic goes by doing a host x.x.x.x (External IP address) or whois x.x.x.x (External IP addres) the latter gives way more info, not much of it useful for what your looking for, but times. the host command doesn't give a hostname.

I think my only concern here is that it sounds the schooling table would restrict web access entirely. His curriculum is online based so that wouldn't work unfortunately; though I could put the latter note to use to keep track of his internet habits; kids ugh.

He's resourceful, but only as far as google will take him (or duckduckgo if he actually listens to his ol dad); so I'd actually wondered if it would just be easier to modify the hosts file to restrict access to search engines; but I'm not sure how I would be able to effectively "disable" the restriction once school was done.
Is it possible to swap between two different hosts configurations?

The only way my inexperienced mind can figure doing this is having two hosts configurations stored somewhere with a script that swaps them respectively tied to an alias that I could execute via ssh when studies were done? May not be the most effective method, but I'm all ears.

Sorry for the ignorance.
 
The other option would be to setup a proxy server, and configure your kid's system to use the proxy for all connections going to the web, that way you can just check the proxy logs and it's also possible to block websites/domains in the proxy configuration.
 
The other option would be to setup a proxy server, and configure your kid's system to use the proxy for all connections going to the web, that way you can just check the proxy logs and it's also possible to block website in the proxy configuration.
I'm not well versed in proxies either. Looks like I got my own homework cut out for me lol! Thankfully I've learned to enjoy the research. Thanks!
 
I'm not well versed in proxies either. Looks like I got my own homework cut out for me lol! Thankfully I've learned to enjoy the research. Thanks!
Look for stuff about Squid there is a lot of stuff you will find as well as documentation, here's a basic setup.
 

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