My 14 year old daughter lives with her mother in another city. Her mother and I both want a way to audit and control our daughter’s access to the internet, use of email, instant chat, etc. Her grades have plumetted and all she wants to do is spend time on-line. She’s so addicted, she sometimes goes to bed, then gets up in the middle of the night, spending hours on line while her mother is asleep. However, she has some legitimate scholastic needs for email, chat and the internet so we don’t justwant to pull the plug.
What we need is a way to audit/log the time on, time elapsed, time off of specific programs (IE, AOL instant chat, etc.).
There a lots of spy programs that record screen shots, etc. I hope we are never reduced to spyingon our daughter. What we need is a way to measure what she does when. Unfortunately, her mother has ZERO technical skills, so whatever needs to be done, I need to be able to do remotely. We are not interested (at least not yet, thank God) in monitoring the content of what she sends/receives/chats/etc. What we want to know is when she is doing what and for how long. Since her mother can barely turn on a pc, I need the log file to be emailed or ftped to me at regular intervals.
The daughter and mother share (two pcs) a cable modem with a simple hub. The cable company / isp assigns them both unique and dynamic ip addresss (dhcp, I would assume). They do not have a programable router or proxy server in the house. My daughter’s pc is running Win98SE, but I could load NT 4.0 or Win2000 if needed.
Can anyone recomend a solution? I’m not opposed to buying new software and/or hardware if needed. I have Timbuktu Pro 2000 on her pc so I can fix things remotely, but I’d prefer a solutionwhich does not require me to take control of her pc just to read the log file.