Vista's Parental Controls Are Easily Foiled

Since everyone is touting Vista's new parental controls and the ability to set guidelines for and then monitor your kids' computer activities, I thought I might interject a note of realism. Brian Livingston, author of Windows Vista Secrets, shared this tidbit with me:

When you set up your master account you're asked for your password and then asked to supply a "hint" in the event that you forget your password. You know the hints: dog's name, mother's maiden name…

The hint screen is shown each time you access your account. So let's say your kid tries to log in as you, but doesn't know the password. The hint screen appears and prompts them. It doesn't take much of an imagination for your kids to correctly guess your hint, does it? This renders the hint screen pretty useless.

Reading the fine print of the developer's manuals, it seems that Vista's parental controls for games can also be ignored if the developer doesn't remember to specify a starting mode for the game. According to ExtremeTech, a kid could also run the executable file of a game with a command that sort of bypasses the whole user experience, at least on the beta version.

Finally, parental controls let you block access by program or application, by time, by rating (as in games with ESRB ratings), or by filtering websites. But all an enterprising kid really needs to do is plug a USB flash drive into the machine and access the content they don't want you to know about from the drive.

Bottom line: Vista offers a better degree of parental control than has ever been available before, but don't be fooled into complacency. You can't turn the job over to your machine.