- How easy was it to install? Very, quite, not very, not at all easy - if not easy, please say what happened
My other half did the installation for me, he used Windows 7 RC1 and everything seemed to work okay. The installation suggests to disable any firewall or anti-spyware applications currently running on the machine. This might be a bit too technical for some people, and could cause problems.
- Once installed, was it simple to use or complicated?
If you read the instructions it is simple to setup, site was clear and made nice use of new web technology like AJAX to ensure an ?Application like? feel, however, the site itself was very slow which made it considerably harder to set it all up. It might benefit from possibly a standard form which parents could use to tweak the word library. Not every parent would know which information could possibly be ?dangerous?. At least with a form parents could be made more aware and decide based on that if they feel filling in this information is actually needed.
- Did you use the web console to see a summary of your children?s web activity? If so, how do you find this?
It showed the web activity and although it showed a lot of detail in certain areas it lacked information in others. Why it doesn?t filter certain underlying sites like google analytics or doubleclick which although are part of the website that is being visited only make the list bigger and harder to audit for parents is beyond me. Also it doesn?t seem to go very much into detail about which parts of the site are actually visited.
- Did you customise the word library to monitor for the use of your own words (such as your child?s mobile phone number or school name)? Was this easy?
Adding words is relatively easy, although as mentioned earlier it would benefit from a standard form which contains a list of words and phrases which would be beneficial to be on the list.
- Did you learn anything new about what your children do online? If so, what (say in general terms)
As we keep the computers in the living room we generally have a good idea of what is going on at all times. Most interesting though was the time spent on the websites and the sheer number of visits certain sites get.
- Do you think CyberSentinel helped you keep your children safe online? What was the best aspect of this?
I think it could possibly work as a support tool. In combination with decent virusscanners / anti-spyware / firewalls on the one side and parental guidance and physical monitoring on the other it could be a good ?tool? in the overall toolkit which parents should use to keep their children safe on the internet.
- You currently have a free licence to use this product for one year - once that year is up do you think you would purchase this product? The cost is £25
As my other half is well versed in IT and all the internet traffic the kids pc?s generate goes through a transparent proxy which already filters it using a combination of blacklists both on domain & ip bases and content bases (word filtering) in combination with a strict firewall that blocks unwanted applications / traffic I don?t think this piece of software adds a lot of our current setup.
- Any other comments/ questions.....
Although kids might not be able to do it so easily my other half found it very easy to circumvent the security measures put in place by this application. I fully understand that not everyone will have the knowledge to do so but once information like this becomes available online kids could potentially perform these steps relatively easily. Most of these things can be avoided by limiting the user permissions for the kids user - not many people actually know how to do this and the default users on the Windows operating system come with administrator ?like? rights.
When booting, the application does take a little while to become active, which means that if you are quick you can get about 20 ? 30 seconds of unmonitored internet time in before the ?popup?.
The time based internet restrictions are the easiest to circumvent as by simply changing the system time (the clock on the computer) to an ?unrestricted? timeslot the restriction gets lifted. Since the application talks to the server on a regular basis, it should be relatively easily to base the applications internal clock on the server rather than the system clock of the PC. If the parent specifies beforehand the time zone in which the client PC is operating, the time based restrictions couldn?t be thwarted - not even by changing the computers date / time zone locally, after the system has connected to the server for the first time, (which it does at login to retrieve any updates to its profile anyway).
The application itself is also very easy to ?switch? off. As although the processes which run the application will not let themselves be ?killed? simply disabling the service and the startup application using ?msconfig? and rebooting the machine will stop it from booting up the next time it logs in. Using a standard feature of msconfig the machine would automatically undo the change next time the machine starts up, meaning the machine could be used ?unmonitored? without the monitoring tools ever noticing.
Another option would be to simply block the domain / ip address of the server the application tries to connect with in the firewall. This can be easily retrieved by looking into the processes used by the application in Process Explorer. This would of course only be a temporary solution as eventually someone would notice that the machine isn?t reporting any information. If the logging indeed works as advertised it would at that point be able to report on what has been going on.
The blocking of chat didn?t seem to work in all cases. IRC chat for example using standalone clients like mIRC or embedded java applications in websites do not seem to be deterred at all.
One major problem we found with the application itself was that when you want to install for example flash player or any other application which requires applications like browsers / explorer.exe etc to be closed (most Adobe software for example) the computer recognizes the CS executable as CompuServe which stops the applications from installing until this process is shutdown which is very inconvenient considering it cannot be closed in the normal way.
Last but not least the popup screen itself. Although there might be a very good legal reason for it to be there, I don?t see the point of it. I do not want my kids to know we are monitoring what they are doing as knowing you are being monitored stimulates forced ?proper? behavior. This might all sound really good but what if they are not using their own computer? I see a much greater value in a monitoring tool that aids me to educate my children so they behave correctly wherever they use the internet. For that to be effective they shouldn?t be reminded every time they login that their parents are watching them.