:: Firewalls, Or How To Drive Your Children Insane ::

I'm going to catch some flack for this one from my mom and my in-laws, I know. God love 'em, they're super great peeps. Yup. They are all good people, excellent parents, fine examples. Good human specimens overall. But good god they are paranoid Internet users.

Firewalls on top of firewalls? Really? High level security layered over firewalls layered over Firefox security layered over tiny armed guards sitting inside the computer, the likes of which are only found at the Pentagon and Fort Knox? Is this necessary? At my in-laws' house, security is so tight you can't see gap.com. I know because at Christmas I wanted to take advantage of the sale they sent me an email about but no matter how hard I tried, the Gap website told me I had to enable cookies.

I am a former web programmer. I know my way around computers. I enabled cookies in Firefox (just for gap.com) but then there was something else. Some other mysterious setting that was out of whack. Something about images. I set the computer to allow gap.com to show images, but then it was something else.

I gave up without success and put the settings back.

I could have used our laptop. Sure. Easy fix. They've got wireless there. Perfect. Only wait. No. They actually don't know the security passkey for their own wireless network, so while their own laptop is all set up and ready to go, no one else can get on the network. Talk about security.

Here at my mom's house I encounter similar problems. When I have difficulty viewing a particular site, I can never tell if it's the site, a Firefox setting, a firewall setting, a Windows Security setting, or something else. The list of security features enabled on her computer is truly astounding.

It affects them, too, only they just think it's them. I'll send my mom a link to our Flickr page and she will be unable to see anything and she'll try a few tricks she knows in Firefox or whatever (she's savvy, people, I'm not saying she's not) and it won't work and she'll finally just tell me, "I guess I can't see it. I guess I don't know how to work it."

It's not you, mom. It's your safety equipment. There's just so much of it.

This morning I decided to set up my sister's wireless router so that when we're home, we can get on the Internet even while Evan's asleep in the computer room. I have the exact same router at home and have configured ours and those of other people numerous times without difficulty. It's really not that hard. Only apparently it is. Because here I am sitting in the hallway right outside Evan's room, the ethernet cable stretched in one direction from under his door, the laptop plug stretched out in another direction into our bedroom (Brian ran out of batteries on his trip or something). There's no wireless. I had it configured and ready but then a series of confounding events occurred and I now have no idea what's going on. When Evan wakes up I have to take a second go at things, only this time I'm using the laptop to set things up and only connecting my mom's PC at the last possible minute.

UGH.