How do you keep a parental eye on the internet activity of your children?  

So far, we've kept the computer in the living room.  (I am always amused when a naive parent describes how shocked they were to find what happened after they put a computer in their child's room with unlimited internet access)

Recently, we switched from dial-up to a DSL connection and someone helped up set up a wireless network.  So we went from 1 computer running XP to 2 by adding a borrowed laptop.

We plan to limit the use of the laptop to the public areas of the house (kitchen table and living room).  

Anything else you do?

There's a few things you can do to restrict what your children can and cannot do with your computer(s).

Firstly, when logged in under an administrative account, you can create seperate user accounts for your children.  Creating a "restricted user" account will allow a user to operate the computer and save documents, but will prohibit them from being able to install software applications or make harfmul changes to system settings and files.

Another thing to do (which is internet related) is use the Content feature of Internet Explorer; found under "Tools" -> "Internet Options" -> "Content"  Enabling this lets you restrict what content is allowed to be viewed by the user.  There are several options available to you under that section, such as a list of websites you can create and flag them as always or never viewable, depending on their content.  Also there are sliders for language, nudity, etc with varying degrees of filtering to prevent certain subject matter from being accessable to your child.  It's basically a huge parental control feature set.

A few of my clients asked me of the same thing, my answer is always the same:
While there's commercial software that would do the job, note there's no 100% anything when it's a battle between a can and a can opener, be it security, spam, anti-virus, or access control.  Most of these Internet access control software uses filters based on key words, site addresses, etc. that users have to update.  Problem is many sites don't contain such keywords, and new ones pop up all the time it's impossible to keep track of all of them.
In the end, even if there was such a software that could successfully do it, your kids can always access whatever they want at a friend's place or find ways to disable such a mechanism, and you can't protect them from it forever.  The best thing to do is to educate them and instill values in them, expose such things to them so they won't go out of their ways to get at them just because it's prohibited at home, we all know how fun it is to do things we're not supposed to do.
Kind of like parents trying to protect their children from hearing cuss words, they're going to hear it elsewhere anyways so it's ultimately futile, but if you properly guide them and educate them they'll know the difference.

Ditto on what Demordrah said.  Windows XP is perfect for people with kids who want to limit the access to the computer.  The internet control options are also great too.  With XP professional you can also encrypt files to where only certain users can access them.  This takes the protection to a new level.

-General Lord

Problem easily solved. After she downloaded MSN and all of the pop-ups started appearing, I banned her from the computer. No problems since!

Karl

Thanks for the help.  

PS: If we add a computer of our own, I'll be sure to look for XP pro and adjust the settings.  

I am sorry for sounding like a preacher here, but dont any of you have kids you can trust? I mean, I have raised my children to be very open and trustworthy. Sure we monitor occasionally what they are doing, but it always proves pointless. My daughters are not online that often as they would rather be playing ball or chasing the horses out back. But when they are online, they are very specific as to what they are looking for, and what they are doing, ie; emailing friends, looking around amazon or ebay.

I think if people spend more time teaching their kids the difference between right and wrong, they would spend less time policing them.

IMHO,
CH

BTW, no insult intended to anyone.

Does anyone know how to put a time limit on an account?

My sisters kid is spending too much time on the internet and they want to limit her to one hour per day.

As a teenager myself, i know that no matter what parental controls you have on there, i can bypass them to get whatever i want.

so can your kids.

That's why I dont let my kid use the computer period. And when he gets older, too bad, he wont have his own computer. Hell be able to use mine for school work if required, but any other time he can do something else constructive like chores or playing with friends and forget about a computer until he leaves for college. Oh wait, I may give him his own computer to do school work, but he wont have an interent connection, and I'll keep all networking equipment locked up in my home office room. I'm sick of seeing punkasskids running amok on thier computer-naive parents and then brag about it online to other adults. (ahem)

I thought you could assign them to a'users' listings, and users are able to download or install anything. Or am I thinking of Win2K?