Child Monitoring software?

[JDMxB]

Ok guys, here is the dilemma i'm having.

The girlfriend wants to limit the amount of time and content that her kid brother and sister get into on the internet.

She's using SBC Yahoo DSL and the already supplied Yahoo Parental Controls--i've set them up and they work great--when they are actually accessed correctly. To do so, you must use IE...and the clever kids have found out that they can use Firefox to bypass the login for the parental controls to monitor their activity.

The main issue we are having is the time of use..if you use IE the yahoo suite works perfectly, cutting off the internet at the predetermined times set by us in the parental controls. However, when using Firefox, it does not cut them off. So again, they are using Firefox all the time to circumvent the time limitations as well.

I looked briefly into Net Nanny, but it seems like it does the same stuff as the yahoo parental controls.

One thing we have considered is to prohibit the download of anything whatsoever, and delete firefox from the computer. Is there a registry string or an application even that we could mess with to disable downloading altogether? I think it would solve the main issue we are having.

And for those of you who are going to respond with "just watch what they do"--my girlfriend lives an hour away from home in order to attend school, and only is able to come back on the weekends to the family house. And the mom and dad sure as hell don't know what goes on with the computer situation.

Thanks guys.

 

[comapro]

you can make it so they cant install FireFox with a limited user account in windows XP/2K. probably older versions of windows work too.

http://uis.georgetown.edu/software/documentation/winxp/winxp.creating.accounts.html

if that doesnt look right, you might have to add a user from the control panel -> user accounts, then click properties on it and set the group to restricted.

limited/restricted users can't install programs or change system settings.

 

[Animefalcon]

Buy a linksys or some router that has ip adress controls
That way they'll never get around it unless they go tho a different prox server of course

 

[jaykrue]

Use both suggestions from the posters below for the best protection. Giving them basic user accounts (as opposed to power user or administrative accounts) limits when they can log on to the computer as well as content restriction. Using the router does it one step further and limits them from accessing certain sites. Also, to prevent proxy browsing, you might have to edit a hosts file in your computer to reroute those sites to wherever you want. The hosts file is generally located in

C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc

where C is the name of your windows hard drive. WINNT might also be WINXP depending on what you're using.

The hosts file can be opened/edited in notepad. Here you put all the possible proxy sites you can think of and put a new ip address for them. For example, if proxy site is

http://www.proxy.com

with an ip address of 281.26.211.68 (this is not really the address, I just used random numbers), then you can redirect it to loop back to the computer's internal address (generally 127.0.0.1) so that it will return a 'page cannot be displayed' msg.

This is before (ignore the spaces, they're just there to denote space):

281.26.211.68_____________http://www.proxy.com

and this is after:

127.0.0.1_________________http://www.proxy.com

This can also be done in Firefox's hosts file but that's a whole other post.