Apple : Tutorial: How to make your Mac child-proof

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Tutorial: How to make your Mac child-proof Posted: 21 Aug 2011 04:00 AM PDT Your Mac's sheer ease of use is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, kids love it. On the other… kids love it. That gives parents an interesting challenge: encouraging our children's computer use without letting them cause chaos. However, the good news is that it doesn't take much effort to protect your Mac from inquisitive young minds. The single best thing you can do is give everybody their own login in System Preferences > Accounts. That keeps everybody's files, folders, applications and iLife libraries separate, so there's no danger of anyone meddling with the family photos. It enables you to limit the applications and websites your children can use. And it gives everybody their own space that they can tweak things to suit their personal preferences. Give everyone a password - if you don't, anyone can log in as anyone else - and use System Preferences > Security > General to password-lock your screensaver, sleep mode and System Preferences. Childproofing your Mac is also about simplicity. You can disable Spaces in System Preferences to avoid confusion, and you can also use OS X's Parental Controls to activate the stripped-down Simple Finder mode and prevent changes to the Dock. Third-party software can help here too: for example, Lockey (£4.33) disables your Mac's keyboard to prevent accidental keystrokes interrupting movies and TV shows, KidsMenu (£12.38) provides a kid-friendly program launcher and both AlphaBaby (Free) and BabySafe II (£12.38) create safe spaces for babies to interact with sounds, shapes and colours. Last but definitely not least, make regular backups of everything important. Accidents can happen, disaster can strike and hard disks can and do fail. If it matters to you, make sure you have another copy that's in a safe place should anything happen to your Mac. How to use Parental Controls in iTunes 01. Block iTunes features iTunes has excellent parental controls. Go to iTunes Preferences > Parental Controls dialog to disable access to iTunes' features and content ratings. For example, you can prevent your kids accessing your podcasts, other Macs' shared libraries, Ping or the iTunes Store. 02. Apply age ratings For content you've bought from the iTunes Store, you can enforce age ratings - so you can limit movies to PG only or block access to apps rated for adult content, say. However, note that such ratings don't apply to content from elsewhere, such as ripped DVDs or CDs. 03. Share specific things If you use iTunes' sharing options (Preferences > Sharing) and share specific playlists, other users can access those playlists from iTunes when they log in to their own account. So, for instance, you can share music but not movies, TV shows or podcasts. Parental controls screen out smut and stop your kids developing square eyes. You can also hide drives and prevent accidental edits. As your children get older and more tech-savvy, you'll need to take things up a notch to keep your stuff, your Mac and your kids safe. You can add third-party software such as the child-friendly browser BumperCar (£18.54) or the parental control system MacMinder (£18.54), but if you're running OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard you've already got some superb parental control features. Parental controls are on a per-account basis, which means you can have different levels of restrictions for each child. You can restrict how many hours per day each child can spend on the computer, lock them out altogether at specific times, limit which applications, widgets and utilities they use (something that's particularly handy with older children who might want to use applications such as BitTorrent clients for dodgy downloads) and control the kinds of websites they can look at. There's more. You can put limits on who your children may iChat with and send messages via Mail to on a per-contact basis, and you can even prevent them from seeing profanity in the OS X Dictionary - although the options to stop users from burning CDs and DVDs, changing the printer settings or changing their login password seem more useful to us. Parental Controls can also log your children's activities so you can keep an eye on what they've been doing, or attempting to do. If you click on the Apps, Web or People tabs in Parental Controls you'll see the Logs button at the bottom right of the window. Click on Logs and you'll have four options to choose from: websites visited, websites blocked, applications and iChat. You can then view logs from the last day, week, month or since the day you first switched on Parental Controls. It's not all perfect, unfortunately. Creating a list of approved sites can take an eternity, and an old, unfixed bug means Parental Controls' attempts to block adult sites also block some secure HTTP connections. That can prevent perfectly legitimate websites from working: we've encountered problems with Gmail and Facebook over secure HTTP, although of course Facebook isn't supposed to be used by anybody under thirteen. If there are sites you really want the kids to access you can override the block by adding their IP addresses to the Always Allow These Websites list. Remember too that if you enable Parental Controls on your own account, you can end up limiting your own Internet connection, blocking your applications and generally annoying yourself. You can hide external drives by unticking them in Finder's Preferences > General and Preferences > Sidebar, but if you'd like more robust protection select the external drive on your desktop and press Command+I. Under Sharing and Permissions you can now change what people can and can't do with the drive, and you can do it per user: just click on the plus sign, select the person, and then specify whether he or she should get full access, read-only access or write-only access. You can do the same with files and folders. No matter how careful you are, accidents can and probably will happen - which is why we'd strongly recommend you get hold of an external hard disk and use it with OS X's superb Time Machine, which has saved our necks on countless occasions. If a file or folder gets damaged or deleted Time Machine enables you to travel back in time, find an intact copy and bring it back to the present day. Time Machine has another ace up its sleeve: you can restore your system from a Time Machine backup to a completely different Mac via the OS X Migration Assistant. That means if the worst happens and your Mac gets damaged or destroyed, you can get up and running on a different machine while you wait for your Mac to be repaired or for your new one to arrive. How to get started with Parental Controls 01. Choose the child Parental controls are tied to individual accounts, and you need at least one user account - excluding your own - before you can apply restrictions. Open System Preferences, select Parental Controls and click the lock. Select the user account you'd like to change. 02. Allow specific apps The first screen lets you control the apps a user can open. Ban App Store apps or limit them by age. You can use the Allowed Apps panel to specify which apps this person can access. Enabling Simple Finder makes the OS X desktop friendlier for younger kids. 03. Watch the clock The Time Limits feature makes your Mac off-limits when your kids are supposed to be studying, sleeping or walking the dog… The Time Limits tab enables you to specify how many hours per day each user is allowed, and Bedtime blocks access at specific times. Older children are fearsome opponents, but you can still take steps to secure your personal data and prevent them from accessing sites they shouldn't… When your kids know as much about Macs as you do, keeping your stuff safe can be incredibly difficult - but it isn't impossible. Software such as WatchMac (£12) can let you know about authentication failures such as somebody trying to guess your password, while Parents Remote (£25) even enables you to spy on the kids to see what they're up to. We'd rather outsmart our kids than spy on them, however, and there are plenty of ways to do that. Apple's own Firmware Password Utility can prevent simple tricks that your kids might try to bypass the parental controls you've so diligently created, and changing your router's DNS provider from your ISP to OpenDNS (Free) enables you to filter web content to screen out inappropriate content. Alternatively Internet Security Barrier (£72) isn't cheap, but it delivers an excellent set of per-account filtering tools. You can protect sensitive data by hiding it or encrypting it. Secret Folder (£25) makes hiding folders easy, while Apple's own FileVault takes care of the latter option. To enable FileVault, go to System Preferences > Security > FileVault and click on the Turn On FileVault option to encrypt and password-protect your entire Home folder. Be aware, though, that by switching on FileVault you lose the ability to recover individual files in Time Machine. You can create a new, encrypted disk image on your Mac, on an external disk or on a USB flash drive in Disk Utility, while Knox (£22) enables you to create, access and Spotlight search multiple "vaults". If you want to encrypt files and access them on other platforms such as Windows, the cross-platform TrueCrypt (Free) is just the job. How to keep your stuff safe with Time Machine 01. Get it running You can control Time Machine from System Preferences > Time Machine. Select your hard disk (or network volume) and use Options to specify which folders don't need backing up. We skip Applications, Downloads and Library to keep things speedy. 02. Travel back in time If you or your little darlings delete or damage an important file or folder, you can go back to when your file was still intact. Open the folder where the intact file used to be, then run Applications > Time Machine to travel back in time. 03. Restore the file Time Machine keeps hourly, daily and weekly backups (depending on how much disk space is available). Click on the arrows to move backwards in time until your file appears, then -click on it and select the Restore option to bring it back.

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