What are you trying to protect your son from exactly? Why must you use a keylogger and not just a website blocker?
im 19 and as a former teenage ill put it bluntly parents wont get around teenagers we will find way of getting on the computer im not one for porn but my mother tried every way of getting me off the computer but it never helps if you have physical access to a machine you can get through anything believe me it possible all you have to do is type in google how to get around something and it will tell you the hackers are always one step ahead of the blockers
agreed. I wanted to say this first and make sure that OP doesn’t waste money on software that won’t do anything, but knew I would probably get flamed and told not to tell someone else how to raise their kids blah blah blah. You are that afraid of porn though? You can’t install that software on his friends computers
Agreed as well. It’s akin to installing a spy cam with mic on his head, so that data can be sent every 20 seconds to your parents email of what you do at school and with your friends. I mean, if you’re worried about his computer habits, wait until he’s with his friends without computers and time on their hands. The shit I did at that age? OMG if my parents ever knew. At some point, a kid has to figure stuff out on their own, good and bad. But I don’t have kids, so I can’t possibly understand. Point being, you can’t watch over their lives entirely, and you’re kidding yourself with keylogging software. The kid will figure it out if he has the motivation to.
The key to such things is not to tip your hand. The software is for your information only. You use the information you gather to make better judgements about how your kid is acting and thinking.
For example, you will find out what the kids are planning and can position yourself to intercept. Kid planning on sneaking out to go to a party, stay up late and read, kid watching porn all the time, move the computer to a visible area. No need to explain why you made these choices, you just get to seem like psychic parent who always thwarts the best laid plans. Your kid will either give up or become the next Alexander the Great from learning to defeat every move you make.
If you dont trust your kid that much maybe you should just ban him from the internet. Otherwise, having been a kid myself, I would really suggest you just let him whack off to some porn. What’s the harm? I’m against such intense parental supervision for what is essentially harmless entertainment.
Don’t forget. Some people are just shitty parents.
SanDiegoTim, I don’t know your kids, but if you had tried this on me I would have turned your whole network inside out.
The answer is to talk to you children, if you’re a decent parent they’ll probably listen to you.
I have to agree with hotea1313. You can’t stop teenagers and porn. They can and will get around it. Like one of the previous posters said, he can just get a live Linux distro and run from the CD. Unless you password protect your BIOS and change the boot priority. But then, if you are like most parents, you will set that password the same as the password for something else you let him have and he will have the BIOS password, too.
Can you run a live linux CD without restart? If so, even password protecting the BIOS and modifying the boot priority won’t matter. And if he can run a live linux, it doesn’t matter what you have installed in Windows.
It’s a never ending battle. If the kid has some smarts, he will get around it. And I have always thought it creepy to spring a keylogger on a kid and not tell him. How would you feel if someone was monitoring everything you did, saw, and typed on a computer? I would feel pretty damned violated.
you can get around a bios password ive done it my mother tried that also all you need is to get a linux boot disk to delete a password on the computer put in your own keylogger and you have the passwords to the computer and you never need the keylogger until your mother changes the pass again (for some reason she has given up and has had the same passwords for the past 4 years)
If she were smart she’d just change her password to " . " Your terminal appears unable to process the PS/2 input. Remove the cable and check to see if any pins are bent or broken.
Don’t forget even if you do put software on the computer after the first time you call out your kid regarding porn/party/drugs/whatever you just lost the chance of you ever catching him again, not that he would stop anyway
A little punctuation and capitalization would go a long way in making your post more easily comprehensible.
And you cannot get around a BIOS password with any kind of disk because the disk drive is not working until you enter the BIOS password. In my laptop you get three tries and then it shuts down. The next time you start up the BIOS takes its sweet time just pretending it is doing something. Trying passwords is not a viable way of gettingt into my laptop. I guarantee.
I am not a parent but I think it is a combination of communication and trust but also supervision and the kid not totally knowing the extent of the supervision. A keylogger cannot be your only or even your main tool and you cannot ever disclose that you are using it. So if you find out objectionable things then, without saying anything direct, you just take measures. Blowing your cover would be silly.
However, on most desktops I’ve seen it’s trivial to open the side of the computer (especially since most cases have thumbscrews nowadays) and hit the “reset CMOS” button which usually kills the password entirely. Not the most elegant solution, and you’ll be aware he’s up to SOMETHING, but you’d still lose all the vital information like “what.”
Well, yes, but then you have evidence of something even worse. Not to mention that it is trivially easy to lock the case with a padlock. Any computer of mine which has any important information is chained down so it cannot be easily carried away by a burglar. I do not care about the computer but the information is valuable to me and even though I have backups I still like to chain down the computer case.
she actually at one point decided to remove the power cable from the computer i just borrowed a power cable from a friend
They can also be had for $2-3 at a computer shop.
Yeah, uhm… Maybe I’m weird, or maybe I’m too far away from my actual horny teenage years, but going to a friend’s house to wank ? Eww. Letting a friend wank in my seat, in front of my computer ? Splooge on my keyboard ? EWWWW ! 
My dad was smarter : he took the power fuses. But that’s why God invented the extension cord
If I had kids I’d hide some fireworks in the computer case that would be set off when they plugged it in or when they did what they shouldn’t do and it would scare the shit out of them for a while. Like so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDi02BLrhk4
When each of my daughters was about to start high school, we bought her a computer, installed it in her room, put it on the network, told her that we gave it to her to help her with her homework, and forgot about it.
Both girls turned out fine. One of them is currently getting her PHD in computer science. The other wasn’t much interested in computers and turned towards the arts (but ended up in a business job because, well, the arts doesn’t pay much).
I’m confident there were some inappropriate uses of the computers at times, but sometimes you have to give your kids some slack. After all, once they’re off to college the horse is out of the barn anyway.