Norton Family

[Typhlosion]

My children have their own accounts and are able to disable and even unistall the norton online safety. They do not know the password.

Here's how they do it:

1. While in a monitored account, disconnect from the internet (I did it by flicking the switch on the laptop that shuts off the wireless signal and I also did it through the "connect to" menu item).

2. Click NSM (dog's paw).

3. Click disable NSM

4. When asked for the "parent email" and "parent password" type anything (but you must put something in both fields)

5. Click OK

6. You will get a message

7. Ignore it and click OK

8. NSM is now disabled. reconnect to the internet and there will be no monitoring of activity.

This is a serious problem that must be resolved: I need your help.

[AshokV]

Typhlosion,

In the point #6 of below post, message clearly says:

"The Norton Safety Minder is not sure about your account information. If you continue, a note will be sent to your parent letting them know you are disabling Norton Safety Minder. Do you want to continue?" 

YES/NO options are shown to the kid to choose. On Clicking 'YES' , Norton Safety Minder sends a notification email to the parent when internet connection is set back.

Norton Safety Minder is designed to monitor the kid activities while enhancing the parents - kids communication. When any notifications are received, parents can have a chat with the kids to understand the need for disabling Norton Safety Minder.  So that parents and kids can maintain a good relationship.

Thanks,

Ashok

[sojourner42c]

My children have found that if they continually refresh a desired page it will eventually load, and the icon for nsm will disappear from the task bar temporarily ( it returns after about 3 or 4 minutes). In that time they may surf without limits. This has occurred repeatedly on two different computers. HELP!!!

[andrew_d]

Can we get some clarification here?

sojourner42c, are you children doing what was described earlier in this thread, or are they just refreshing the page over and over? 

in regards to Typhlosion's initial posting... when the network connection is restored, Norton Safety Minder detects the network connection and it will re-establish network monitioring. If the children have time limits, it can take up to 5-7 minutes for norton safety minder to synchronise with our servers and establish that time limits may have been reached. 

Andrew D.

[Typhlosion]

That is no solution. Yes, I'm informed. By the same technique they can completely unistall the programme. This has no utility, other than I know my kids are roaming freely as if I did not have Safety Minder.

Is there a proper solution that prevents them from disabling Safety Minder?

[sojourner42c]

The kids just continue to renew pages sometimes it will eventually load. They also sometimes repeat this  same method and close then reopen explorer and a page will load and for a few seconds, then they can surf where they want and pages will stay active as long as it is left open,totally defeating the program.

[andrew_d]

If you children are using limited windows accounts instead of administrator accounts, They shouldn't be able to uninstall products. Are your children's windows accounts limited user accounts?

Uninstall notification events are sent to the activity page, and any uninstall event should be treated as a violation of the house rules, which should prompt parents to respond accordingly.

[andrew_d]

sojourner42c

1) Can you post a link to a page that they have been successfully able to access by reloding the page multiple times?

2) Can you confirm what category is blocking that site?

3) What is the version of the browser that you are using?

Thanks,

[sojourner42c]

The have shown me how they are able to get on runescape.com ( which is a blocked site in their settings). They are using internet explorer 9. I sometimes receive emails stating NSM has been disabled. It seems that NSM is temporarily disabled and then restarts during the method they are using to get around it. Meanwhile the browser window that is opened in which they have evaded NSM is free to surf and play, and if closed NSM is working again until they employ their tricks again.

[MinnesotaDad]

There are a couple of problems here. First, the NSM client seems like it can be defeated with some fairly simple steps, and now that they're published on this forum you can bet that 9 out of 10 kids will find them. As I understand it the procedure is to flood the client--essentially generate a denial of service attack against it, so to speak. Symantec needs to make the client more robust and able to withstand this sort of behavior.

The second issue appears to be that the kids in question have administrative rights on the computers they use. I don't know why that is, maybe it's because doing so was easier, maybe they need them to run business critical applications like Call of Duty: Black Ops, or maybe the permissions were enabled just to set up the kid's desktop profiles and never removed. In any case, the reality is that if you have administrative rights to a Windows desktop, there is very little in the way of restrictions that can be put in place for your account. I would seriously consider whether the kids need administrative rights on the machines they use, and if not (hopefully not) then remove them. That will prevent them from removing software and from doing a host of other troublesome things.

One other consideration that transcends NSM entirely but applies to blocking content, since that appears to be the main theme in this thread. NSM is only capable of blocking content on a PC or Mac. Some kids will simply pick up their iPad, or use their Internet-enabled TV, or any of a dozen other methods to get online, none of which are monitored by NSM. If you're going to block that content as well, then you need something beyond a client-based solution. One straightforward way to do this is to block at the gateway, i.e., your home connection to the Internet. I use a service called OpenDNS and it is fabulous.

Perhaps Symantec could implement something similar to OpenDNS that integrates with the NSM client, maybe hosting their own upstream DNS servers that allow content filtering but report the results back to NSM. Now that would be an interesting client application.