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Can I disallow printing with parent controls on Snow Leopard?

I have two children under 4 who are quite computer-savvy, and have their own account managed by parental controls to restrict what they can do an see. However, I haven't found a way to disallow them from printing, and I'm looking for a way do so. Their pictures of Sesame Street and Word World are cute and all, but I'd like to be in control of what (or even if) they print. (Our printer is connected wirelessly, not directly to the Mac.) I know I can add more time or authorize use of a given application by providing my password — can I do something similar for printing, such as approving or denying particular print jobs?

How do you troubleshoot Family Safety reports

I have set up Microsoft Family Safety in Windows 8 for my daughter's account.

At first I got meaningful reports via e-mail each week. But then the e-mails started reporting no activity, even though my daughter still uses the computer. The e-mails are still sent to me, but indicate that she is not using the computer at all.

Family Safety is definitely still active on the computer. It limits how long she can use the computer. So only the e-mail reports are buggy.

I don't know how to troubleshoot this since the e-mails are generated by Microsoft. Any ideas?

How do I make a machine "blank screen" for a period of time (as a penalty) if certain noise levels are reached?

My kids (4 and 5) yell a lot when playing games on the computer. I found an effective cure for this. When I hear loud noises, I ssh into the game computer and do:

chvt 3;  sleep 15;  chvt 7 

This will turn off the screen for 15 seconds on Linux. I've told them that the computer doesn't like loud noises. They totally believe this and beg the computer for forgiveness. They became much quieter, but not to the level that I would be happy, and so I need to continue this educational process. However, I am not always around to do this manually.

Is it possible to automate this? A microphone is attached to the box. If the level of loudness passes some threshold then I want to run a command.

How can I limit the usage time for an user profile in Windows?

I have 4 kids so the battle for time on the living room computer never ceases, I am also implementing an attempt at some level of control over how much time the kids get based on their behavior etc during the week. Ideally I would like to be able to set each profile up to have only a certain allotment of time, say 2 hours that they can use and once that two hours is nearly up it warns them and once complete it automatically logs them out.

I know the family control stuff can limit the time frames during which they can login but it does not seem to allow this quantity based control I am looking for...

Any other options in the market that you know of?

How can I disable private browsing/incognito mode in browser X?

Search results for this question contain nothing but arguments for and against. Please take those up in another forum. I want to know is there an option, extension or hack to disable private browsing mode in each of the following browsers?

• Apple Safari v?+ (Private Browsing)
• Google Chrome v1+ (Incognito Mode)
• Internet Explorer v8+ (InPrivate Browsing)
• Mozilla Firefox v3.5+ (Private Browsing)

OS-agnostic solutions preferred.

Depending on the use-case, alternate tools like traffic monitoring, OpenDNS or NetNanny might be valid, but they are not relevant to this question.

How can I filter my internet connection based on content?

I have a WinXP PC that my children (4-14 years old) use but want to restrict some internet activity to prevent them from being exposed to some of the questionable and adult content that is available.

We have to PC in the living room so we can monitor them as much as possible but when unattended I want a second check.

What are my options and is there free software that works?

Router that can control when internet is on/off, based on time ranges?

Is there such a thing (a router) where you can set when you want the internet to be accessible?

e.g. Only allow 1 hour of internet usage per day.

or turn on internet between 6-8pm, otherwise off.

And set exclusions by MAC address.

Track kids browsing history even when they know how to clear it manually

I have a colleague with two teenage boys (yes, cue cliche's about 'I have this friend see...') He's currently having issues with them browsing pr0n and wants to do a little spying on their browsing (I'm staying clear of the philosophies/ethics on this.) The kids are savvy enough to clear their browsing history when they're done. As I'm his goto for IT he has asked me if there is a way to keep a hold of the browsing history.

The family uses Macs, and the kids surf with Safari. I know that browsing history is kept here ~/Library/Safari/History.plist. I figure there should be a way to write either an AppleScript or other script (Python/Ruby/Bash) that can backup this file to a different location (/opt/local/history, etc.)

Since the kids know to clear their history when they're done should the file be periodically backed up with something similar to a cron job or something like Hazel? While that could work it seems like it would create a ton of little incremental backups.

Or is it possible to 'watch' ~/Library/Safari/History.plist and incrementally add changes to a backup file (saving a diff so to speak) but not lose any data?

Any ideas/solutions appreciated.

UPDATE/EDIT: Got the word from concerned dad that the oldest uses Firefox on a different PC, so the OpenDNS solution (preferably at the router level) is the best answer so far as it would capture usage for the whole house.

How to help children avoid the dangers of internet [closed]

I am sure many of you "SuperUsers" have children, and you have the internet. What software, computer settings, etc do you do to protect your children?

I feel strongly that the best defense is to supervise your children's internet activities and teach them what is and isn't acceptable. I also feel that the family computer should be in the main public room of the house, and NEVER in their bedroom. I agree with the information in this article.

So, the above is my first line of defense. I also feel that the parental controls in windows provide some benefit.

In addition, on all of my computers, I modify the search preferences. I set the SafeSearch option to Strict (i.e.: Filter sexually explicit text, images, and videos from your search results).

What do you do? Thanks.

Windows 10 Child account problems

I have a laptop that was running Windows 8.1 that I've recently upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. I had to delete my six year old son's local account because Child Accounts now have to be Microsoft accounts. That means changing his password to something that's going to be difficult for a six year old to remember, oh well.

I've got a couple problems now. The main thing my son used to do in his account was to watch YouTube videos. We did bing video searches for kid-friendly terms and would then pin them to the start screen. I'm able to do pretty much the same thing now, but he can't watch any of them. We can see the preview of the videos in a bing video search if we hover over them, but when we actually try to view them we just see a blank white square. Also, if I try to visit youtube.com by typing that in the address bar in Edge or IE it seems to run forever, almost like a DNS problem. This was with "block inappropriate sites" set to off in family settings. I've turned it on, but it didn't help.

With 8.1, it would filter some YouTube videos, but it would see a message on the screen to that effect. My recollection with 8.1 is that you could set various levels of blocking set, this seems to be gone now. In general the family settings in 8.1 offered much more control, but there's no message on the page. I'm afraid that if I add youtube to the allowed list, it won't block ANY youtube videos, which would be BAD.

Another problem I'm having is that Windows 10 seems to have lost the ability to ask a grownup for more time. I've allowed my son 1 hour per day (previously 45 minutes, but the new Family Settings time limits aren't as granular as before.) When he ran out of time in 8.1 it would offer me the chance to log in and give him more time. I've been eating up my son's computer time trying to troubleshoot these problems, but I haven't found any way to give him more time. The message that's displayed on the screen when he's running low on time implies that this is possible, but I don't see how.

Parental Controls in Ubuntu - per user

I would like to set up parental controls on Ubuntu for a friend of mine. I want it so that the child user has the controls set, but the parent user is not restricted. To be clear, they are sharing one computer, so a router based solution won't help. And I would like a set of step by step instructions to do this. Just one way of doing it.

I'm an experienced Ubuntu user, happy at the command line. I've spent quite some time googling for this along the way. I hope that the GChildCare project will eventually make this easy, but it is not ready yet. In the meantime, the WebContentControl GUI provides a way of managing parental controls, but apply them to every user on the computer (easy WebContentContol install instructions and detailed instructions, discussion and related links on ubuntuforums).

The ubuntuforums post has a FAQ that states that user-specific configuration is not possible with WebContentControl, and then provides 3 links he used to help him do it. But they are far from step by step instructions. There is this thread which is notes along the way and linking to this article about squid and dansguardian. And then to these two dansguardian articles which are somewhat in depth ...

So does anyone know of an existing guide to how to set up parental controls on ubuntu with some users not affected? If no one has come up with an answer after a little bit, I'll set up a community wiki answer so we can come up with a guide.

Parental control or outbound firewall?

Based on the Age distribution of Stack Overflow users some of you might also have kids in the ages when certain images can be very disturbing. An age when they cannot yet decide by themselves what might be very bad for them and what is ok. Actually according to that graph some of the users here are still in that age range...

Anyway, I am currently using a service provided by local ISP that filters every network traffic (not only http!) except the few sites they allow and and a few other sites I added to their list. The problem is that their service makes my network connection slow and breaks often. In addition when I need to use the Internet freely I can turn off the filtering but then the other computer used by my children is not filtered either.

So I am looking for a solution where I can configure their machine, better yet only the account they are using to be limited to certain web sites. As they are using Ubuntu Linux, I am most interested in a solution to that OS but others in this forum might be interested in solution to other OS-es so feel free to answer those too.

I thought of using iptables but I'd rather use some tool to configure it than just manually add rules.

I'd like to be able to allow sites such as www.google.com and stackoverflow.com but not images.google.com or youtube.com .

Yes, we are also considering just letting them use whatever they want at some point but I think at the age of 6 it is a bit early...

Can I block ALL file downloads in Chrome?

I'd like to disable all file downloads in Google Chrome. I've done this to IE with group policy trivially, however Google Chrome apparently cannot do this natively. There is a setting named "set download directory", but disabling it has no effect, and setting it to a directory inaccessible to user just makes Chrome prompt for a save location.

I also tried an extension named "EXE and msi blocker", but it blocks ALL URLs that end with .exe, there are legitimate web sites that don't serve downloads that have .EXE in URLs.

I just want to make my kid's browsing a bit safer. I prefer a secure solution (one that cannot be subverted trivially), but will settle for something less secure too, if it does the job.

Update (some more background info): We've "standardized" on Chrome in the family, so I'd prefer to use it as a default browser on all computers. I'm using K9 web protection for generic online filtering. We don't have any IMs installed on the kid's computer, so we don't need to worry about that yet. My son is 9 year old, so we try to stay on top whatever he's doing on his computer, he's not allowed to install/run/download anything on his own, etc.

How do I disable Cortana in Windows 10 or at least disable web search results from it (for other users)?

Is it possible for me (parent/admin account) to completely disable Cortana for other users (kids/standard accounts)? ...or at least from using it to search things that are not local on the PC itself. I don't want my children gleaning all the Internet has to offer quite yet.

EDIT: @Chirag64 and @mc10 - thank you so much for your answers, but neither answer really addresses my question of "completely disable Cortana for other users (kids/standard accounts)". I do not want to disable it for me, only for my kids...
The "duplicate questions" and the one that was linked as having answers - also don't help me with this...

Enforce user time restrictions to log out or off from Windows 7

How can I limit the time spent on the computer or force a log out from a Windows 7 machine?

I used to use Windows Steady State to limit users (kids) from being on too long but SteadyState does not work with Windows 7 Home Premium and is discontinued.

Is there a way to set this up in Windows 7 where it will kick off a user after a set time? Or perhaps there's an alternative program that can help limit the time one user is at the computer.