Teenagers! Bah! Humbug!

So make an html page that reads 'The page you tried to access is currently not available' and invoke it when they try for myspace (or whatever). You can do trickery like this by the hosts redirect (add a port) and when you get a hit on that port, display the page :)

Cheers

PeteS

is this too subtle?

martin

Or do all of what you suggested less the re-install. Then it'll "gum up" after a while. Now let them try their own clean-up for a while. Maybe for a long while.

It was the same thing with tires on my bicycle when I was a kid. Wheelies and screeching stops impressed the girls but also caused numerous blow-outs. At some point my father showed my how to install a new tires, then said that from now on I would be certified to do my own installs and also certified to dip into my allowance if it needed a new inner tube or tire.

Ouch.

Sure. But why is it that older browsers do it correctly and newer ones don't? Is that, ahem, progress?

I will see, depends on the capabilities of their newer PSoCs :-)

I like programs that are way past of what most everyone else thinks was EOL. Because those are often DOS-based which means they work :-)))

Thanks! Hadn't looked for that one yet. Wonder why they didn't set the default the way it was in Mozilla then.

Mine was on a date in a restaurant - the waitress commented on my after- shave; she said she liked it because it was what her Dad used. ?:-/

Cheers! Rich

Interesting. In your opinion, is Seamonkey better than Firefox?

In my opinion, yes. Seamonkey is the old Mozilla, with current maintenance. The Seamonkey folks are rolling in things that come from the MOFO people as they see fit.

I like the all in one design of Mozilla, and Seamonkey. It works very nicely as a javascript debugger, website editor (though NVU is better), news reader, totally compliant web browser, IRC ... It uses a lot less memory than having Firefox, Thunderbird, and web editing programs running at the same time.

In my opinion, one of the dumbest things MOFO did was dump mozilla, and rally all of their resources behind Firefox. This isn't a commercial fair, you don't get any extra brownie points for unseating Microsoft with a free browser.

-Chuck

You send them all to 127.0.0.1 which is always your local IP (localhost). Every machine has that in addition to any other IPs, but it's only for self-reference since any other machine that targets that address will target itself and not you.

It's the same as others have stated. Just set the address to 127.0.0.1.

I was pointing out another advantage of doing that. I was not suggesting doing anything different.

OK. Already done. I thought you had an even more clever trick ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Just pointing out the added benefit that it speeds up pages with ads. You don't have to wait for a timeout before it gives up on the ad.

See

That site also has lists of bad sites to add to your restricted zone.

Please remember the discussion is about teenagers, they quickly learn to Google or chat their way to information. The host files kludge won't last long, and will give them way too many ideas.

If it's just crapware you're trying to avoid, maybe it's time to convert an oldish computer to Fedora Core Linux, and let them run that?

Or, failing that, just get them their own Crapware XP computer, let them trash it, then when they leave, re-install the OS from the Emergency CD.

-- Michael Darrett, Senior Computer Resource Specialist Wireless network setup, computer upgrades and repair. Sacramento, California

I blew past the admin password once as a demo for an IT guy who insisted that those are safe. He turned pale within seconds. Later I cracked another password-protected PC in under five minutes. Don't remember if it was 2000 or XP, or how I did it, because it was a missing child case. Basically I went in with a DOS boot disk and deleted a bunch of files, then out and back in with Windows. Pretty much like kicking in a door. After that hack the PC would no longer accept any password settings and the files of all three users lay bare. We only wanted the ones from the missing kid, to gain clues we could give the Sheriff, but I had to quietly tell the father that certain things should not be stored on a PC.

Well, my faith in OS passwords was pretty much shattered. After obtaining the desired clues such as visited web sites and emails my faith in today's youth was also quite shaken. The mom froze when she read some of that.

I have a CDROM that boots a NT, Win 2000 or Xp, and allows you to delete all passwords. It is part of a package of software tools intended to recover files from a damaged or locked system. I had to get them to fix a computer where someone used the admin. account to browse p*rn sites. Whatever they hit, it changed the password every time the computer was shut down. The anti virus and anti spyware tools could only be installed at the admin. level, but I could only log into the user accounts. Then it took multiple passes with the anti virus and anti spyware tools to clean or remove almost damaged 8,000 files and spyware. Almost 20 hours of running and rebooting a slow system without enough RAM

Which makes me think, what good are Windows passwords anyhow? The other utility I had needed back then was a NTFS file converter because DOS couldn't otherwise handle this file system.

Another question I asked myself lately after buying a new laptop is whether there is any routine that "calls home" every few hours when the machine is hooked up to the web. That would stop most thiefs right in the tracks because you could give the police the IP address where the call originated. Is there anything like that yet? What I did so far is install little harmless-looking hidden files that clearly identify the machine as mine. So in case it is found there'd be the proof. But usually they aren't found.

They keep the guy at the next desk from easily snooping on you.

IIRC, Lojack has software designed for the purpose. Here it is:

But @ 49.00/yr, why not just insure the laptop and make sure you have adequate backups?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:58:12 GMT, Joerg Gave us:

Ah... the joys of such a simple thing as knoppix.