Choosing the right software

Parental control software is a daunting category. On Amazon.com, there are currently 66 results for "parental control software."

However I have the magnet to help find the needle in the haystack. I have been a Software Engineer for sixteen years and I can unequivocally tell you that parental controls should be a function of the operating system. All other parental controls are band-aids and kids are smart. There are plenty of ways to skirt around parental control software. These can easily be found with a quick search on Google or Yahoo.

Today there are options for parental control software which are built-in to the operating system. There are two software packages that I recommend:

1. Apple's OSX 10.5 (Leopard)
   10.4 (Tiger) has a good level of parental controls but they are vastly improved in 10.5
2. Microsoft's Windows Vista Home
   Note that other versions of Vista (Business and Executive) do NOT have parental controls.

These two are far from perfect, and are in desperate need of some of the features which have been available for years in other software packages. However the strength of Vista and Leopard lies in their user account management system. When set up correctly, the only way to bypass parental controls is to know the administrator password.