I was asked by a concerned parent "How can I keep my kids from looking at stuff they shouldn’t?" Well "stuff they shouldn’t" is relative to each parent. Also being in my twenties with no kids I’ve never really thought about it. So I’m off to the races, that’s right I go straight to Google! LOL - from here I am flooded with a ton of information, there are a lot of products out there for just this situation but the more I look the more they cost. I’m here to tell you I’m cheap, I would probably stand over my kids shoulder than pay $50 for some software to do it for me. But your in luck, I found some good solutions the inexpensive way (or free ;-))

There are plenty of different products out there some are an entire suite that monitor everything and some are on an individual basis. Again these may not be the best security features out there, but they are free and they can help get the job done.

Windows Live Oncare - Family Safety
With Family Safety, you can control the people your children communicate with, the websites they can view, and the search results they are shown. Contact list settings can help you make instant messaging safer in Windows Live Messenger and e-mail safer in Hotmail. Also you can block all sites except kid-friendly sites and those you specify or, you can allow all sites except specific categories and sites you block. You can also get activity reports to keep tabs on the sites your children visit.

Glubble
Glubble is a free parental control suite Firefox addon. It aims to help extend the appeal and adoption of Firefox to families of elementary school age children. The Glubble add-on for Firefox enables families to provide a protected, fun and educational web surfing experience for kids by enabling their family circle to link up via Firefox to decide what they can see online.

ProCon Latte
ProCon, another Firefox addon, is a content filter for the browser. It can filter any kind of material (pornography, gambling, hacking, cracking, etc…), it can also block all traffic, making sure that only desired websites (set in the Whitelist) can be accessed, and includes a profanity filter. ProCon also has password protection in order to keep others from changing the settings.

IMSafer
IMSafer lets you know when your children may be in dangerous situations online, and shows you how they represent themselves in their online profiles. IMSafer Basic is free and available to any parent who wants it. Basic will support up to one monitored IM account, IMSafer Plus allows for monitoring of an unlimited number of IM accounts and support for MySpace and Meebo. IMSafer automatically detects and starts monitoring any account it finds. You don’t have to do anything. IMSafer currently supports Microsoft (all versions), AOL (both AIM and ICQ), Yahoo! (all versions), MySpace and Meebo.

Now for those who want to take a more techy advanced roll in their children’s online safety. I found how to control the time a user can log in and there is also a program called Keylogger that records every keystroke a user makes.

Time Restriction
go to Start - > Run -> type CMD
now to select the user type net user (you will need to know the password of the account to set this up)

ok, you can see the user you want a time restriction on now so here is what we type
net user [account name] [Password] /times:DAYRANGE,TIME;

DAYRANGE codes: M,T,W,Th,F,Sa,Su
Time: use 24hr time

EXAMPLE: net user Paul janurary123 /time:Su-Sa,3-16;M-F,17-21;
to reset use /time:all

Keylogger
KeyLogger silently records all keystrokes typed including emails, word documents, excel documents, windows password, chat room activity, voice recording, instant messages, web addresses, and web searching.

Filed under: Security, Software, Tips and Tricks, Web