Norton Family

[mijcar]

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dgardner wrote:
...

“If you want to protect your kids from inadvertently interacting with inappropriate content, OnlineFamily.Norton makes that possible. The service blocks sites with mature material, and other questionable content.”

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Read that carefully!

"Inadvertantly."  What an interesting word.  Think about what that sentence means.

If you want to protect your kids from ACCIDENTALLY interacting with inappropriate content ....

Great.

But if you want to stop your kids from DELIBERATELY interacting with inappropriate content, well, then, Symantec will have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Shopping for guns for your private Columbine, Symantec won't stop you.

Interested in how to make a lovely bomb of household items, Symantec won't stop you.

Feeling depressed and looking for an easy way to get out of it all, Symantec won't stop you.

But if there' the slightest danger that you might accidentally look at some site you don't want to (one about solving math problems, perhaps?) well Symantec will do everything in its power to keep that from happening.

[thetazman]

Apologies for my last post above i'd spent quite a while writing a nice long post and the system messed things up & it was BLANK! I wonder if that was a Norton conspiracy??? I couldn't retrieve it again so i'm having to re-write what i can ...

Its been a while since a Norton e'ee contributed to this thread, sorry 1 norton e'ee with the great new norton way of doing things. it's a shame that norton seems to be composed of only "single" or "childless" people as there is no way a parent would agree with the principles or ethos of Norton/Symantec. Is it REALLY ok for my youngest child to surf "without restrictions" online, isn't it NORTON's job with this s/ware to protect their innocent minds, or as your e'ee stated who cares that is not our responsibility a parent should deal with it - i thought we were by buying (or in this case beta-testing your s/ware) your s/ware in the hopes it will protect them from harm?

Since my last posting i've been busy searching online for comparable  software but in this case that are actually sold as parental control apps rather than as ways of having a good hearty chat with my child. NSM is not a parental control appn it is not designed that way, it is purely an aide for us to have a 1 on 1 with our child if they decide to disable it, doesn't make any difference that my eldest disables it, shortly after my youngest goes online & views indecent images/articles. That's ok as Norton says that's all fine, its healthy for kids to view such things don't worry about it (as this is the norton way!). Due to Norton a number of us parents may have had our children view or witness online content which is NOT suitable for them.

I TRUSTED Norton to protect my child from harm (a big stmt I know but i had faith in Norton to work & keep them safe). I never realised that was never the intention of NSM till now!

The reviews i have seen recently online show NSM to be an excellent parental control app'n, do these reviewers actually know what they're talking about, have they actually used it? Do they know that it is NOT a parental control appn? Do they know it is extremely easy to disable by ANYONE??? I honestly feel like sending emails to these magazines/reviewers and give them the truth of the "ethos" of Norton, the norton way & of-course the fact NSM is not a parental control appn

BUT I will give the benefit of the doubt & hope someone in the Norton business sees the light & realises that we are right, disabling NSM should never be allowed for ANY reason (unless the parent disables it).

I wonder how many days or weeks it will be before a Norton E'ee shows their face on this thread & posts something, it seems if we beta testers find a major issue they call it a key component of the s/ware. A backdoor if you will to allow all full access to the WWW

[thetazman]

The Defn of parental control software:

Parental controls provide parents with automated tools to help protect their children while using devices and services. ...

As nortons nsm does NOT do this can they legally be allowed to sell s/ware claiming that it is a parental control app?

The norton e'ee confirmed that is not the norton way ... (to protect our children!)

Message Edited by thetazman on 11-01-2009 10:09 PM

[Matt_Boucher]

First, the developers are not too young to have kids, in fact I have 3, ages 8, 12 and 14.

Second the parents are notified whenever NSM is tampered with.

Let me pose a question to those that have written that this software should not be able to be disabled:

How do you prevent someone sitting at a computer with physical access to the machine from disabling any piece of software?

Matt

[Matt_Boucher]

As for K9 Web Protection, I did a little research and although it appears to be a similar type product, this is a client only installed product. There is no way to configure or monitor from the internet as OnlineFamily.Norton does.

Also as for bypassing that product, there are many ways, including booting in safe mode, or a more clever way would be to just get a new license and install the product again:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_to_Remove_k9_web_protection

Unlike AV or security like products that are trying to protect against other software or internet threats, parental control software has always had the issue that the thing they are trying to protect against is sitting at the keyboard, which is a much different problem to solve.

Matt

[pwscott61]

Matt- thanks for chiming in. You make some interesting points. If we could rely upon the notifications that the sw has been disabled, that'd be far more helpful. As it stands now, many of us,  for weeks and weeks, have been reporting receiving erroneous warnings that the sw has been disabled when it has not. You probably have heard the parable about the boy who cried wolf?? I could exemplify how a conversation spurred by bogus reports of NSM getting disabled might go with a 13 year old, but I'd like to keep this on topic to the software's functionality, accuracy, stability and dependability as opposed to parentind and parent<>child discussion. Let's see if may be Symantec can take care of  the software and we parents can take care of the parenting (I want to acknowledge the fact here that you're a parent Matt, thanks for saying so, and I bet you'd hate if Bill Gates or someone from McAffee or CheckPoint insinuated something about your child or your parenting huh?)

My participation in this forum started with just that issue..."hey, I keep getting these warnings yet I can see NSM working right in front of me...."  That hasn't been resolved as far as I can see. When it then came to light that some of these warnings for some of us parents are properly caused by the NSM so easily being disabled, well that pointed to software we can not rely upon.

Let's recall that Symantec billed this software this way in December of 2008:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/norton/familyresources/resources.jsp?title=ar_try_our_norton_on...

"...

December 2008 

Summary

You’re away at work, or perhaps just in the other room. Your kids are online and you can’t see what they’re doing. Are they safe? Are they following the online rules you’ve set? Or are they doing things they shouldn’t? Do you know what they’re doing when you’re not there? Probably not. Many of us don’t. But now there’s a way you can be there, even when you aren’t......

 Unfortunately it seems to be turning out that the product marketing people should rephrase to say:

" ....But now there’s a way you can be think that you are there, even when you aren’t...."

They could even reasonably say that "...and, wait, theres, more....you can be notified that you're not there, when in point of fact you actually are, you're just relying upon a currently undependable tool for your presence..."

Getting the [late, inititial] response we got from Symantec was just, as I said in my earlier post, stunning.... I am accustomed to forums for customer input and for problem resolution, but I have never seen a reply like what we received above. And then no follow up, retraction, rephrase nor promise of resolution....just the suggestion that we look at our parenting and that we possibly go elsewhere. I just can't find a better word than stunning....may be the thesaurus helps here:

STUN:  amaze, astonish, astound, bemuse, bewilder, blow away, bowl over, confound, confuse, daze, dumbfound, flabbergast, floor, fog, hit, knock out, knock over, knock unconscious, muddle, overcome, overpower, overwhelm, paralyze, petrify, rock, shake up, stagger, strike dumb, stupefy, surprise

[zx81]

I think we all support pwscott61 on that. We are not here to discuss our parenting styles, we are trying to ask you, Symnatec professionals, for help with a malfunctioning piece of software. We are really not that curious how hard is to be a software engineer. We are just asking for help from people who know how the software works and who wrote it. Is it so much to ask?

But the reaction of Symatec professionals is dumbfounding, stupefying and pertyfying. So, please, do not be surprised that people go off and rant here. We are expecting some damage control on your part. What we have received so far was an attempt to pretend that the issue does not exist, solving the problem by exchanging private messages with selected members of the forum, parenting advice and complaints how hard it is to write parental control software. Come on, people, get a grip!!!

Message Edited by zx81 on 11-02-2009 09:04 AM

[Matt_Boucher]

Ok with respect to the tamper warnings that the software has been disabled.

I can report to you that we have tried to reproduce the issue in house where the software claims to be disabled, but is not, but we have not been able to.

We have worked with several of the users of this forum and have yet to find an issue where in fact the software was not disabled. In each and every case so far, the software had some type of issue where it was not running properly and was resolved either by uninstalling and resinstalling, or just enabling it.

Now what does this mean, it means that right now we still don't know why it would be reporting that it is disabled, unless it actually was tampered with by the child.

So where do we go from here, I think if you are able (zx81, pwscott61) to reproduce this behavior that we would like to have our engineers take a look at your system and see if we can determine why it is behaving that way.

Matt

[pwscott61]

I am open to helping Matt...I'd be OK with remote desktop to laptop etc. I have a day or so of meetings here but can send you a PM.

[thetazman]

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Matt_Boucher wrote:

As for K9 Web Protection, I did a little research and although it appears to be a similar type product, this is a client only installed product. There is no way to configure or monitor from the internet as OnlineFamily.Norton does.

Also as for bypassing that product, there are many ways, including booting in safe mode, or a more clever way would be to just get a new license and install the product again:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_to_Remove_k9_web_protection

Unlike AV or security like products that are trying to protect against other software or internet threats, parental control software has always had the issue that the thing they are trying to protect against is sitting at the keyboard, which is a much different problem to solve.

Matt

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I know the shortcomings of K9 that is one of the main reasons i decided to try other "parental control" s/ware. Apologies for stating all Norton E'ees are parentless but just as the other 3 posters above (to whom i agree with) pwscott, zx81 (still not as good as the c=64 but that's a diff topic ) and of-course mijcar, I am getting very frustrated with the Norton team & that is why i'm venting off some of my frustrations. To be honest i'm being quite mild with my rant at the moment I feel very angry indeed with you guys for not viewing it from a parents persepective.

Matt (thanks for coming on the thread by the way nice to find someone at least responding to our views finally from norton!) mention another extremely silly point :

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Matt_Boucher wrote:

How do you prevent someone sitting at a computer with physical access to the machine from disabling any piece of software?

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You can't (in a lot of cases) if they're intelligent enough, but what MY issue is geared towards is that my youngest child is ALLOWED (by Norton) to view online content which is not suitable for them! Also if my 5 yr old can disable the s/ware is there any use having it? Most "protection" s/ware needs some knowledge of the registry or windows operating system to disable it completely. Yet NSM only requires a broken internet connection. Surely it would be prudent & a simple matter to NOT allow the s/ware to be disabled with 100% confirmation that the email address & password is correct, if you have no internet connection, NSM remains open & active. Once the internet connection is available NSM chk's the username/password to see if valid then disables or not

As i said in my post above:

"Parental controls provide parents with automated tools to help protect their children while using devices and services. ..."

NSM does not do this, I just want someone at Norton to put their hands up say yes this is a major problem & we will deal with it, please bear with us. Not if you don't like it then go elsewhere ...

I've said numerous times I do like NSM but this is unforgiveable allowing any individual access to diable the s/ware SO easily!