Microsoft on parental control with OneCare Family Safety
3 Comments
I already wrote the parental control / Internet filtering security tools are so rare, mentioning free solutions available today on the market and considering possibility Google could release something in this space.
While waiting for Google, I wanted to try what Microsoft is doing at least in the home market with its new Windows Live OneCare Family Safety (I bet parents out there already got confused trying to understand which is the name of the product).
The new solution has just been released in beta and it's offered under the umbrella of Windows Live initiative. So this is just a first look at features, I didn't try to find bugs, test workarounds or evaluate URL database consistency in the product (for a public attack at a beta product you better ask Symantec an help...).
After enrolling for the beta, the very first thing to do is download the OneCare Family Safety (OFS from here) and install it on all home PCs.
Then it's time to go online with a browser and reach the OFS Settings Manager, where I need to add my children accounts and decide how to practice my despotic control over my family (but with so much love):
I don't have children yet but let's imagine I have a 20 years-old son and a little 13 years-old daughter. OFS helps me monitor and protect both of them despite different needs and interaction with Internet they have.
For my brave son I want to allow maximum freedom, but remember him he's still young. So I allow his account to surf the whole Internet without limitations, but enable a warning screen when he reaches porn sites.
For my sweet little daughter I still want maximum protection, so I block all categories except Sexual Education (this is a default setting...I doubt a father would allow such category without being obliged with blackmail).
I also add a custom site to be blocked, MySpace, which I heard being so dangerous in these days.
Finally, I also enable web monitoring so anything my daughter will do, blocked or not, I will know:
Done. At this point I have absolutely nothing else to do: my home computers are protected by the OFS client so nobody can access Internet without logging in with his/her OFS account.
Obviously I installed the client with administrative permissions but my children don't use that Windows account to work on the machine (otherwise could be simple to vanish all my efforts).
The first one to approach the new locked machine is my son.
He logs in the OFS client and launch the browser. As configured is free to surf around but after few minutes his restless curiosity for the world brings him to a well-known porn site.
He receives the expected warning:
which quickly turns to be a very annoying remind because every single popup summoned by the porn site, is considered porn itself, and the warning window appears every 2 seconds.
He'll eventally give up, closing the browser and signing out from OFS client, embracing the hacking career within few months, just to have his free amount of daily obscene action.
It's time for my little daughter to sit in front of screen: she logs in the OFS client, opens the browser and the very first thing she tries to do is reaching last website my son visited, the porn one.
Luckily OFS recognized her and immediately block access:
The very second thing she tries is reaching a wonderful site to meet new friends, which she heard at school: MySpace.
As expected she gets another block but this time she's very committed to reach the site and create a permission request:
Few hours later, from the same computer, or remotely from the office, I will be able to see which sites she tried to visit:
and will be able to see and evaluate her request to reach MySpace:
Leaving the role of severe daddy and going back serious, I can say OneCare Family Safety is a very promising tool, filling a big void in current market offering, but has a couple of isses to be addressed:
When the final product will be released we'll see how wide its database will be and how smart the filtering engine will be blocking access to unallowed sites from browser and other applications.
While waiting for Google, I wanted to try what Microsoft is doing at least in the home market with its new Windows Live OneCare Family Safety (I bet parents out there already got confused trying to understand which is the name of the product).
The new solution has just been released in beta and it's offered under the umbrella of Windows Live initiative. So this is just a first look at features, I didn't try to find bugs, test workarounds or evaluate URL database consistency in the product (for a public attack at a beta product you better ask Symantec an help...).
After enrolling for the beta, the very first thing to do is download the OneCare Family Safety (OFS from here) and install it on all home PCs.
Then it's time to go online with a browser and reach the OFS Settings Manager, where I need to add my children accounts and decide how to practice my despotic control over my family (but with so much love):
I don't have children yet but let's imagine I have a 20 years-old son and a little 13 years-old daughter. OFS helps me monitor and protect both of them despite different needs and interaction with Internet they have.
For my brave son I want to allow maximum freedom, but remember him he's still young. So I allow his account to surf the whole Internet without limitations, but enable a warning screen when he reaches porn sites.
For my sweet little daughter I still want maximum protection, so I block all categories except Sexual Education (this is a default setting...I doubt a father would allow such category without being obliged with blackmail).
I also add a custom site to be blocked, MySpace, which I heard being so dangerous in these days.
Finally, I also enable web monitoring so anything my daughter will do, blocked or not, I will know:
Done. At this point I have absolutely nothing else to do: my home computers are protected by the OFS client so nobody can access Internet without logging in with his/her OFS account.
Obviously I installed the client with administrative permissions but my children don't use that Windows account to work on the machine (otherwise could be simple to vanish all my efforts).
The first one to approach the new locked machine is my son.
He logs in the OFS client and launch the browser. As configured is free to surf around but after few minutes his restless curiosity for the world brings him to a well-known porn site.
He receives the expected warning:
which quickly turns to be a very annoying remind because every single popup summoned by the porn site, is considered porn itself, and the warning window appears every 2 seconds.
He'll eventally give up, closing the browser and signing out from OFS client, embracing the hacking career within few months, just to have his free amount of daily obscene action.
It's time for my little daughter to sit in front of screen: she logs in the OFS client, opens the browser and the very first thing she tries to do is reaching last website my son visited, the porn one.
Luckily OFS recognized her and immediately block access:
The very second thing she tries is reaching a wonderful site to meet new friends, which she heard at school: MySpace.
As expected she gets another block but this time she's very committed to reach the site and create a permission request:
Few hours later, from the same computer, or remotely from the office, I will be able to see which sites she tried to visit:
and will be able to see and evaluate her request to reach MySpace:
Leaving the role of severe daddy and going back serious, I can say OneCare Family Safety is a very promising tool, filling a big void in current market offering, but has a couple of isses to be addressed:
- Users management
The whole system works only if every family member has a Windows Live ID (the former Passport account), which obliges parents to create new mailboxes and provide passwords to children.
This is a counter-sense considering the amount of malicious spam arriving by email every day.
It's also very annoying and has could be a pain trying to use very old Passport accounts (I had to create a new one to perform this preview), even if they are supported. - Speed
Since all web requests have to be transmitted to Microsoft (or at least seems so) and verified against the defined policy before allowing the user to reach a site, there are moments where the navigation is unacceptablly slow, even on a 4MBits ADSL line.
When the final product will be released we'll see how wide its database will be and how smart the filtering engine will be blocking access to unallowed sites from browser and other applications.
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3 Comments:
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Fine, but utterly useless. Not just that using MSIE on the internet is an open invitation to malware, think about what happens if someone installs Firefox. Or surfs to https://www.sslsites.de/www.myspace.com, utilizing a proxy over an encrypted connection.
Only fools believe that such censorship works. Real parents educate their children, f.e. only allow their young daughter to surf the web for 1 or 2 ours, and only when one of the parents is present to watch where she surfs.
And allow Mr. 13-years old junior to rather whack off at his favourite pornsites than urging himself to rape female classmates. -
"just that using MSIE on the internet is an open invitation to malware"
That one is getting real old now. FireFox is just as vunerable these days. - I think this is a good idea for people that not know nothing beyond microsoft, I want to try that tool and watch if it have blocket proxys XD, or and if the users can't stop it cuz kids of today are so smart, I thing its better use squid like a filter of porn sites and more, but linux for microsoft users it's a bit hard to understand at the beginning and almost all the people leave it.
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