As I mentioned in my post a few messages before, I get the message and then monitoring continues.
But since reading @thetaxman's message I have followed his method on a non-administrator account and completely disabled NSM.
AND as @thetaxman said, it is blindingly simple, his 5 year old did it. I am sure it took me a little longer but I also managed it. I can't believe none of us ever thought of this before.
Here's how:
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 method also works for extending time.
I was astonished that such a simple loophole has not been discovered before. I can't help wondering whether any of the seemingly harmless times I have seen the disabled message were really times in which my kids were wandering the internet unmonitored.
David
Matt if you go thro' the above steps listed down by David that should disable NSM without any problems, i have this issue on my main pc & on my kids laptop. Thanks for trying to solve this problem
Thank you. The problem on my systems is reproducing itself multiple times almost every day.
As I wrote before, I have NSM installed on two different Vista Premium 32 machines: an desktop using a wired connection to internet and a HP laptop using wifi. I am not using any other Symantec security software, however I have Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 on both systems.
What I noticed is that frequently I see duplicate NSM icons in the notification area even for accounts that are not monitored. When I right click those duplicate icons they dissappear.
The messages cannot be results of tampering by my kids. The messages were generated many times when I was logged into their accounts testing the software.
I will be more than happy to answer any additional questions you may have.
To be honest, when I was a kid, I tried all of them (zx81, zx Spectrum, C=64 and so on...), however for some wierd reason I finally got my own Atari (safe, no internet access obviously).
Ok, let's see if I can answer some of the issues here.
First, thetazman, those steps to disable the software, we know about that however what other posters have been saying is that it is reporting that the software has been tampered without doing those steps to deliberately tamper the software.
To that point, let me talk with the engineering team again to see if we are handling the case you describe in the best manner we can. BTW I only posed that question because there was a lot of concern about removing software without knowing the right password. Seems a lot of people early were annoyed that they had forgotten their password.
Second, I only pointed out the deficiencies of K9 Web Protection when you told others to use that instead of our solution, as hard as we have worked you can understand why I would defend my team and software when someone takes a shot at us with something else that I believe is not nearly as good a solution as OnlineFamily.Norton.
pwscott61, go ahead and send me a direct email, my email is in my profile, we can set something up and have a look, thanks for the help!
And finally zx81 (home come you guys don't use real names ) the duplicate icons usually indicates that the service has died and was restarted automatically. If we could have a look at your system to figure out what is going on that would help as well.
Thanks matt, from your comments and zx81’s it seems his issues are nothing to do with intentionally disabling nsm. Here’s hoping you manage to sort out his woes
with respect to the disabling of nsm as both you and Marian before you stated norton is/was aware of this flaw. What I need to know is anything going to be done about it as to be honest if nothing is I’d rather go elsewhere like Marian recommended and find a proper parental control system. Nsm does not work, is thus going to be fixed?
I don’t want to waste my time & effort on a program that does not do what it says on the tin (so to spk) but I need you to clarify it, Marian told me to leave (if i didn’t like the fact the s/ware can be disabled then go elsewhere)
when the network is not available, children are able to show the credentials dialog box and get that dialog to succeed
there are 3 scenarios for this credential dialog to show up
- uninstall
- extend time usage
- disable safety minder
In all cases the parent is notified of each occurrence. However there are reasons for 2 of the 3.
For uninstall we found that many people "forgot" their password and found that if we offered no way of uninstalling our software that they would get upset. Again the parent is notified of this condition.
For extend time usage, imagine this scenario, you network goes down, your child is typing a paper in MS Word and the time monitoring screen shows up. The only way to extend would be to put your credentials in, since we can not validate as the network was down your child would be locked out. Again not a scenario that we wanted and also the parent would be notified of the time extension when the network returned.
For the final issue "disable safety minder" there was supposed to be check for when the network came back on to return the state back to enabled by default. And again the parent would be notified of the condition of disabling safety minder. I currently have my engineers looking at this to see if something changed over the previous versions.
So there are really 2 things going on here, several are reporting seeing "incorrect" tamper messages and you are seeing the behavior of not re-enabling by default when the network returns. We are looking at both of these issues.
If I understand your point correctly, this problem (as perceived by the parents in this discussion) is caused by a need (as perceived by the software developers in this discussion) to be able to uninstall, disable or extend time even when there is no network connection. This is a perfectly reasonable need as it would be very frustrating to be locked into the software just because the network is down. But instead of handing over control to the child why not hand over to an administrator account on the computer. This would be like most other software we install for our children including, I believe, NIS. If from a limited account someone tries to uninstall or disable NIS they are told they need someone with an administrative password to do the job. In fact, I think this approach is already in place for uninstalling NSM. While testing the method for disabling I also tried to uninstall NSM while in a limited account but got the pop-up requiring an admin account password.
If NSM required an admin password to disable or extend time while the network was down, it would be able to report which admin account did it when the network was back up and it reported the disable/extend.
NSM might not be able to validate whether the admin account being used to disable/extend corresponds to the person who has the account at Online Family but to me that is far less important than the issue of NSM just giving up its job because the network is off.
I just recently started using the NSM and have been pretty happy with it so far. I have also been experiencing what others have with the dreaded “Norton Safty Minder: disabled”. Is the only way to disable the NSM with the internet trick? I just don’t think my daughter would be wise enought to disable and re-enable the internet connection. She claims that she just closes the pop up boxes that come up and it some how disables the NSM. She knows that I am pretty good with computers so I just don’t think she would try to pull a fast one on me, but you know how kids are these days. I have not had time to personally test the product, so I am not sure what exactly she is seeing and what she is doing. I will be looking into it more tonight and sit down with her.
If I understand your point correctly, this problem (as perceived by the parents in this discussion) is caused by a need (as perceived by the software developers in this discussion) to be able to uninstall, disable or extend time even when there is no network connection. This is a perfectly reasonable need as it would be very frustrating to be locked into the software just because the network is down. But instead of handing over control to the child why not hand over to an administrator account on the computer. This would be like most other software we install for our children including, I believe, NIS. If from a limited account someone tries to uninstall or disable NIS they are told they need someone with an administrative password to do the job. In fact, I think this approach is already in place for uninstalling NSM. While testing the method for disabling I also tried to uninstall NSM while in a limited account but got the pop-up requiring an admin account password.
If NSM required an admin password to disable or extend time while the network was down, it would be able to report which admin account did it when the network was back up and it reported the disable/extend.
NSM might not be able to validate whether the admin account being used to disable/extend corresponds to the person who has the account at Online Family but to me that is far less important than the issue of NSM just giving up its job because the network is off.
David
And this is the strategy used by practically every family safety program available. No matter who owns the computer, there must be an administrative user with a password AND the child user.
Now, I understand his point about a child trying to finish a book report when the computer loses internet connectivity. For full protection and helpfulness, this should be a recognized state to NSM. When the child is using the computer in this state, the child should have pre-determined limited access (to various office suites, editing programs, etc), but not to the Control Panel or other means for disabling or deactivating NSM. For example, the child should not have access to Program Files or to anywhere NSM might have itself or its database situated. All browsing software will be blocked.
Once an internet connection has been re-established, then NSM should return to its normal monitoring state and all browsers unblocked per NSM current standards.
We've currently isolated this problem regarding disabling the safety minder when there is no internet connection. A bug was found in the behavior described by Matt earlier in the thread, which is the current solution, in that the safety minder product will check to see if an internet connection is present, and then check to make sure that the client was disabled with an authenticated password, if it was not, the safety minder will be re-enabled.
You can expect this fix in the next version of the the Norton Safety Minder which will be released very soon.
If you have additional problems around this area please start new thread.
) the duplicate icons usually indicates that the service has died and was restarted automatically. If we could have a look at your system to figure out what is going on that would help as well.