PIC-PC - Control Features

Far more sophisticated than a simple PC time limiter - you can set different rules for game play, web browsing, chat, educational use, TV, etc.

Screenshot showing typical rules for 'Overall PC Use'
Calypso has time between 6PM and 7:30PM reserved for revision. She has 1H 15m each day computer time during schooldays, but homework on the PC doesn't count towards this total because I've ticked the "Exempt Creative and Allways OK' check box. We've set the computer to force a maximum time of 1 hour between breaks, which must be at least 10 minutes.

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.

See below for how activcities are classified.

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

We have a two-pronged approach to preventing tampering by the child.

FIrstly, there are restriction you can specify within the pIC-PC rules for the child. These can be overriden at any time by the parent giving their password.

Secondly, and extremely difficult to circumvent - we can set 'Windows Policies' on a per-account basis. We restrict a whole range of things like clock changing, explorer file menus, registry editors,task manager, everything a budding hacker might try to sabotage the system. Only the child's account is affected, you can log on to you rown Windows account and have all the normal rights. These restrictions are also very useful to prevent accidental damage by a younger child who is over-enthusiastic with their clicking!

 

How Activities are Classified

Programs: 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. Unless you have special requirements, many people just accept our guesses.
However, we feel you should be able decide what is a 'fun game', or educational', or 'violent', so you can choose to categorise them yourself: The programs 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 - except Facebook - 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.

FaceBook: in addition to recognising 'Facebook' in the title, we can also install an IE add-on to recognise any access to the facebook web site, as some facebook pages do not contain 'facebook' in the title. This add-on is currently only available for Internet Explorer under Windows XP, . We are working onW7 / Vista IE protected mode, and other browsers.