I have a 14 year old son who is not happy about parental controls--I know he now knows about using Safe Mode from a friend.

I started up Vista with Safe Mode to see what I could do on his account. It still wouldn't let me sign in under his name b/c of the time limits....but there must be a way around that. Can I tell if he has used Safe Mode to get around parental controls?

Is there a way to put a password on Safe Mode? I set a password for BIOS, but I don't know what good that does. Anything?



I know there is parental control software out there (Web Watcher is one I was looking at)....but what good is it if a teen can just get around it?

What is a parent to do?

Dee

Hello Dee,

I do not think that completely blocking Safe Mode is very sensible, as it will stop you fixing your computer if something breaks. Here is what I think you should do:

• Make sure your son's account is a Standard User account. This ensures that he cannot change more settings than he is meant to.

• Make sure that your Administrator a strong password on it that your son cannot guess.

• Use Group Policy and parental controls to lock down access. If you do not have Vista Ultimate/Vista Business Editions, you can use the registry, and I will help you with this. What parental controls are you using, and what version of Vista are you using?

• In terms of the BIOS password, that is very sensible, your son will ignore this for the moment, but if he suddenly becomes a true hacker overnight, then this will be a crucial line of defence. If you carefully fiddle the BIOS, you can stop bootable USBs and Linux Live CDs from working, without using your BIOS password, so do not worry about osholt's supposed workaround!

• In terms of Safe Mode, this is an age old problem. Here is about the only solution: how to enforce parental controls in safe mode in Platform SDK Security and you will notice that it requires some programming. I will do this for you if you wish, but be warned that it could take me up to two weeks as I am quite busy, and need to reinstall my OS and Visual Studio before I code anything (long story) Else, we could add all required parental control services and dependencies to Safe Boot, though you are now loosing Safe Mode's only crucial services.

• You will notice that this is not perfect. There are loopholes to all of these with known solutions. If you discover that your son is exploiting a loophole (which I tell you are hard to find) then come back here and we will close it.

Good luck and I will help with the scripts, registry edits and BIOS when we are ready.

Richard

Can we please make sure this thread DOES NOT move into hacking territory. Please keep all responses within the Forum Terms of Use. Thank you.

Originally Posted by tom982

Another thing you could do, is set time allowances on your router.

Even if he does bypass the parental controls, he won't be able to access websites that you don't want him to.

I know I will get criticised here about how he can use a proxy, but after testing my router, it was dynamically blocking the websites and whenever I went through a proxy, it also blocked that.

If you need any help on how to do this (assuming your router is compatible), then let me know and I would be happy to help

Good advice Deserves some, but I cannot give any more to you yet after that good tutorial of yours, so my compliments will have to suffice!