Magic UPC Maker – Parental Control
Do you know what your kids are doing on their computer? I was listening to one of those knuckleheads in the news stories this morning and I heard a story that only the Internet can generate. As they say, “Truth is stranger than fiction”. A teenager recently did a Google search for “UPC Maker” and found a freeware open source program that created UCP symbols.
The adolescent then used the program to generate fraudulent UPC symbols and markdown products such as iPods to $14.99 iPod and stereos to $9.99. After a weeks worth of pillaging the local stores, he got greedy and went to re-price plasma TV down to $99. Needless to say, a savvy security guard caught the young thief and that was the end of the story.
If you are parent, you may ask, what can you do to stop my child from doing something of this magnitude? You can set up parental controls, but if your kid can produce fake UPC symbols that technique is worthless compared to their computer knowledge. You could buy a program to track their activity; this will make it easy for you to view their activity from another terminal.
Tracking Programs
1) FamilyCAM Silverstone Software – Silverstone.net
You can test drive it for 30 days and pay $34.95 after the expiration period. The program captures screens and keeps a log of programs used but not does not capture keystrokes.
2) Spector 2.2 ($69.95) from SpectorSoft.com
This program lets you record everything someone does on a PC, providing a snapshot of every screen looked at and, if you want, every keystroke typed. Unlike the browser’s cache, kids can’t defeat this program without knowing the parents’ password.
Has anyone tried one of these programs?
