Why I heart Mac.

You can copy and paste parental controls from one account to another. It even works from one machine to another. *love*

Selling your children

Ok, perhaps "selling your children" is a bit harsh. However, there are commercial parental control software companies that sell your children's private conversations to their "trusted partners" It was reported by the AP today that one company in particular is gathering data from children's private online conversations and selling it for marketing purposes.

This is all part of the standard software agreement. When parents install the software and press "I accept," they agree to allow their children's online conversations to be sold to the highest bidder.

The software is developed by EchoMetrix Inc. based in Syosset, N.Y. They make several products including Sentry, Sentry Total Family Protection, Sentry Basic, Sentry Lite and FamilySafe (there is a product called SentryPC which has no affiliation with EchoMetrix) If you are using any of these products, there is a form online from which you can opt out of the data mining. The opt-out link is available through the program's control panel.

According to the Sentry press release on the subject,

[Our Software] is a proprietary software engine that reads digital content from multiple sources across the web, including: instant messages ("IM"), blogs, social environment communities, forums, and chat rooms.
...delivers the unsolicited raw conversations in real time...
...unmatched ability to get inside privileged IM chats...
...access to unfiltered and unbiased teen digital conversations...

More information can be found in the Associated Press article

Lessons Learned

After about a ream of pages printed out featuring Curious George and the man in the yellow hat, I found out the hard way that you have to pay attention to all the checkboxes in Parental Controls. To tell the truth, I thought that I had unchecked this on all the kids accounts. But I hadn't.

On one of the computers, I had left the ability for the kids to add printers. Today I had to order a new toner cartridge.


Damage Control To remove the ability for the kids to print, first remove all the printers from System Preferences. Then uncheck the box in Parental Controls allowing the kid's account to administer printers.

Instead, have your kids print to PDF. That will print to a file and it's available in every printer dialog on your Mac. Then they can give you the file and you can print it once, or maybe twice. But you will save paper and toner.

UPDATE: I'm not going crazy. I did remove them. This is not the final solution. The actual solution involves CUPS drivers and is detailed in this post

Security Tip

A simple idea.
Type your most commonly used password into your favorite search window on your machine. See if you can find instances of your password on your computer. See if your password appears in your emails. Now imagine what would happen if someone were to find out that password. Think of all the places you use that password and the numbers of people who might have access to that password.

It might be time to change your password. Especially at your bank.

It might be time to download a bit of password-remembering software like KeyPass.

This post is brought to you by a hard lesson recently learned by Twitter.