PIC-PC - Control Features

A key feature of this software is the ability to classify programs and web sites into one of 11 activity types.  Every rule, restriction, and monitoring option can be tailored for each activity. A special activity "Overall PC Use" can be used to set general rules that override any specific activity rules. This 'Overall PC Use' activity will typically have a time restriction to force them off the PC at bed-time.  In addition to the 11 activity types, there are two  further activity classifications - "Always Allowed", and "Always Banned" for which no rules may be set, as their names imply.

Web-Based Activities are determined by looking for keywords in the web page title. We start you off with a list of keywords, but you can modify and add to these yourself. Therefore time spent on  Miniclip and Cartoon Network web sites can be classified as games playing.  Pages with "chat room"  or "live chat" in the title can be classified as "Instant Messaging  / Chat" and restricted or monitored accordingly. Pages with Inbox or Hotmail in the title can be classified as "Email"

What Restrictions Can You Set for Each Activity?

• You can limit total time spent on each activity per day and/or  per week.
• You can specify different daily limits for weekends and holidays.
• You can restrict any (or all) activities to set days and times-of-day. Multiple time-slots can be defined, and varied by day and on school holidays..

Security Restrictions

To prevent PIC-PC being closed, and damaging or inconvenient changes being made to your PC, you can set security options (on a per-child basis) to prevent any combination of the following:   Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), Control Panel, Registry Editor, MSDOS Prompt , Running programs from removable media (CD, DVD etc.).  In addition to these restrictions imposed by PIC-PC and overridable with a password, you can now also set a number of  Windows 'policies' on a per-user basis via our control panel. This additional layer of security is for those with budding hackers (or who have friends who are budding hackers)  include such things removing the 'run..' command etc.

How Activities are Classified

When you first set up PIC-PC (or after installing new software)  you ask PIC-PC to scan the computer and take a first guess at what each program should be categorised as.
The programs it finds are shown in 'tree' structures that mimic the start menu. It also produces a  tree display of programs anywhere on your hard drive, to catch any that may not be on the start menu. Most common programs will be correctly classified at this point, but you can go through the tree and categorise any we missed, or re-categorise those whose category you disagree with. One person's 'fun game' could be another's 'violent game'.

Web -based activity is classified by keywords appearing in web page titles. Because search engines put great emphasis on page titles, they are a really good indication of the page content - far more so than the URL (web address) which is often quite cryptic - especially for the more dubious sites. Famous sites such as Piczo, MiniClip etc. like to brand their sites by putting their name on every page title, which serves our purpose very well.  You can add to and amend the list of keywords, and change their classification as you wish.   For example, you may want to classify sites with words suggestive of porn as "always banned", or as the category "dubious"  for which you might have some special monitoring set up. As per our philosophy, we put you, the parent, in control of what your child does, not someone the other side of the world who may well have different cultural values.