On 21/09/2010, at 10:07 AM, Crisp, Peter wrote: > All, I bought two Macbooks (the black one previous to the current white one) > running Leopard for my two kids (9 & 7) a little while back. I want to set > them up so they can’t wreck the build so I presume I set up an Admin account > for me and a User account for each of them respectively on the two machines. > They are also using the internet for kid’s games but I want to make sure the > sites they visit, deliberately or inadvertently, are suitable for the age. I > believe “Parental Control” might give me sufficient control over this but I > am interested if others out there have experience in this and have any tips > from your experiences to date. > > Are there any good third party programs (Net Nanny, et al) out there? > > Thanks for any tips. > > Regards > > Peter
Hi Peter, Firstly I must emphasise … Nothing, and I mean nothing beats supervising your kids while they are using The Net. Setup each computer with Administrator Account for yourself and setup a 'Managed with Parental Controls' Account for each of your kids. Parental controls let you manage your kids use of the computer, the applications on it, and the Internet. The Parental Controls preferences are on five sections, each of which is labeled by a button at the top of the pane. System: Determines if the account is managed or if it uses 'Simple Finder', and lets you choose which applications the account's user can run. Simplified Account: Uses 'Simple Finder', this gives a simplified view of the finder, with limited menu options, for younger users, or for those who you want to prevent from accessing all the functions of a normal account. Once you have made this choice, you can still apply the rest of the Parental Control settings. Limit Application Access: Whether you check use Simple Finder or not, you can limit a user’s access to applications on the Mac. Content Controls: Set controls for two types of content, that which is accessible from Dictionary, and that which users can access via Safari or other Web browsers. Dictionary controls: To prevent a user from accessing “inappropriate content". (This I feel is rather useless, as nothing prevents a kid from looking up "inappropriate words" in a dictionary book, or searching on the Web). Web site restrictions: The Parental Controls preferences offer you limited restrictions for Web site access. These controls affect any program that accesses the Web, whether it is Apple’s Safari Web browser; other browsers such as Firefox; or even other applications that can access the Web, such as RSS readers. You have three options: 1. Allow unrestricted access to websites: This places no controls over Web access. 2. Try to limit access to adult websites automatically: This uses a built-in set of filters to attempt to block access to sites with adult content. When a site is blocked, the Web browser displays a page, explaining why it was blocked, and offering to add the site to the list of allowed sites. 3. Allow access to only these websites: If you select this radio button, you will drastically limit the sites that your children can access. By default, Apple includes a handful of kid-friendly sites (but I would not recommend 'YouTube' to be a place to let young children roam unchecked), but you can add your own as well: Mail & iChat Controls: All you can do here is limit which correspondents your user can email or chat with via Apple’s Mail and iChat applications (it does not apply to other software). Time Limits: you can also set time limits so your user can access the Mac only for a limited amount of time on weekdays and on weekends. In addition, you can prevent access between certain times—between bedtime and morning, for instance—on school nights and on weekends. To access time limits, click the Time Limits button in the Parental Controls preference pane. Logs: When you activate parental controls for a user, no matter what type of controls you apply, your Mac keeps a log of the Web sites that user visits. If you have content limitations set, it will also keep a list of sites that have been blocked. If you have limited your user’s access to applications, it will list applications that the user has launched, as well as those that have been blocked, and if you’ve limited iChat access, it will show all chat attempts made with people not in the user’s whitelist. You can view these logs to see what your users have been accessing, and what has been blocked; for instance, this is useful if you want to know what Web sites they’ve been trying to visit. All the above information is taken from my purchased copies of "Take Control of Users & Accounts in Leopard" & "Take Control of Users & Accounts in Snow Leopard". A Video on Parental Controls can be viewed here: <http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#parentalcontrols> There are third-party software solutions as well. A good site with information about Internet Safety for Children is: <http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/internetsafetychild.html> <http://www.microsoft.com/protect/parents/childsafety/age.aspx> <http://www.safekids.com/> After all the above, I must again mention "Supervision of what your kids are doing when on the computer is essential"! Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 2.66GHz / 4GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
