I suspect that many of you have been going through the traumas of upgrading your technology at home so I thought I would share my thoughts on Parental Control with you.

I recently upgraded to broadband and as this meant that I would be connected for much longer and therefore open to attacks such as Trojan horses I decided to upgrade my Norton Anti-virus to Norton Internet Security. When I did so Norton notified me of several attacks per day, I traced back the perpetrators and sent e-mails to their service providers and got responses varying from silence to a big thank you and we will investigate and act.

This was interesting for a day or three but luckily before I got bored another change in my system solved the problem. I added an ADSL router and wireless LAN so my wife and son could also use broadband. It appears that adding this extra layer of indirection stops the attackers getting as far as my machine and Norton has not notified me of any further attacks.

Having given my son access I decided I ought to use Parental Control to limit the sites he could visit. I tried it out first on my machine. I went into Yahoo to trawl the net for content that should be controlled and was impressed by the parental control ability to block access to so many sites. However with a little persistence I discovered a number of sites that were not blocked. Given the number of sites on the web and the continual creation of new ones, this was hardly surprising.

Given that parental control does add an overhead at start up and run time, I wondered if it was worthwhile if it could be circumvented. Norton does provide a service where you can notify them of new sites but that does not resolve the problem. Then I realised that the answer lies in the logs. If my son tried to beat the controls, the logs will be full of failed attempts to access sites that Norton recognises. So if I looked at the logs on a periodic basis I would be able to see such attempts and act accordingly, or better still explain how the system works so my son would not try in the first place.

I now have the system in place and it works fine. I think Norton should make this process clearer as their advertising suggests that parental control software will work by itself whereas it really needs active monitoring to be effective.

This experience made me wonder if the kind of intelligence built into Norton could have uses in e-business. Obviously checks are already made on inappropriate use of company resources. But how much are we learning from errors and error logs. If an e-business user enters information that causes an error do we analyse the reasons? There seem to be three possible reasons:

1. It was a genuine mistake, just a slip of the electronic pen
2. It was caused by a misunderstanding of the input required which suggests that the system should be improved to avoid the misunderstanding
3. The user was testing the limits of the system to see if there are any weaknesses that could be exploited.

With this thought it would be prudent to log all user errors and then analyse them.