HELP! Errant child, spyware needed!

Pssst

Does your child have a USER account on the pc or an ADMIN account?

Make the childs account user only and restrict privileges.

Set web filters in web browser,restrict sites,access,whatever via router.

HappyIdiotTalk

Have you got a second PC at your home? If so you could watch what shes doing in real time without her knowing. Here is a Youtube video which should give you an idea of how it works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PEbeIHODs4

This shows you whats possible. And VNC can be run as a service so no icon in the system tray. And you can connect in view only so your daughter would be none the wiser.

Another alternative is Pandora PC or some software like it. After reading a few comments about Pandora though, I'd personally NOT install it on my PC as it seems to cause a lot of people a lot of problems.

ukjoel

Suggest OP contact police with all details that she has.

It may well be that person on other end of computer already has other details like phone or address details and may try to restablish contact.

Police are pretty hot on investigating this type of thing.

Talk to them.

macman

If she is not at all tecchie, you can just monitor her web browsing by looking at 'History' in IE, because she won't have wiped it.
Just set it to save the no. of days history you want to go back by.
Obviously this will not cover her using msn or similar, but at least if you have told her to keep off certain websites you will know if she has or not.

daska

with a son and daughter the same age and with that same mixed bag of maturity I know exactly where you're coming from. In our case we decided to educate them as well as we are able about the dangers of the www. TBH that hasn't worked, especially with our daughter. The next weapon in our arsenal is to send them to chat with my son's auntie who can tell them the likely outcome from personal experience! Obviously, hopefully, most people don't have that kind of resource available, I just hope this tactic works.

Lakeuk

Just block the Bebo /facebook etc.. sites using OpenDNS

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=20214827&postcount=11

elvch01

I use thinkertec spypal to record ALL my 14 yr old's activities - works a treat for me

HappyIdiotTalk

If you just want to block access to a website without signing up to a third party service, then you can do it locally on the computer using the HOSTS file. In a nut shell a computer has to translate a human friendly website address (like https://www.facebook.com) to a computer friendly IP address (like 69.63.186.12).

To do this it talks to another computer called a DNS server (domain name service). It passes along the human friendly name you have requested, and in reply gets the IP it needs to connect. This happens whenever you connect to a website or service on the internet.

However, what most people dont know is that before it asks the DNS server for the IP address, it checks the local HOSTS file on the computer. If it finds the IP address that it needs in HOSTS it doesn't bother with the DNS server at all. You can therefore blacklist any site you want by specifying the wrong IP address for the website, in most cases you use 127.0.0.1 which is a special IP address that points at your own computer. So when you try and open the blacklisted website the request wont go anywhere.

To try this:

1. First highlight and copy the text in red below:
   notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
2. Now click the START button and select RUN (or press the WINDOWS KEY+R together)
3. Paste the text you copied into the RUN box
4. Click OK
5. You should now be looking at your local HOSTS file.
6. Scroll to the bottom where it says 127.0.0.1 localhost and create another line below
7. Type in 127.0.0.1 then press TAB and enter https://www.facebook.com
8. It should look like the example in green below
9. Click FILE and select SAVE
10. Now open Internet Explorer and try and goto https://www.facebook.com...
11. You should find that you get an error telling you that your not connected to the internet or that the page is unavailable.
12. To fix it, just remove the entry you made for Facebook and access will be restored.

Example of what HOSTS needs to look like:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 https://www.facebook.com

You can do this for any website you want to block by adding more and more lines. If your interested you can also use HOSTS to create aliases for website you use a lot, for example you could create an alias for forums.moneysavingexpert.com so that you can get here by typing just 'mse' into your browser. And you can also use HOSTS to block advertising, phising attacks, worms and all sorts. For more information on this, go here:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

jamespir

if you buy this months computer shopper they are giving away a program so you can track what other users have done on your pc

HappyIdiotTalk

jamespir wrote: »

if you buy this months computer shopper they are giving away a program so you can track what other users have done on your pc

Whats it called? It might be something she can download off the internet.