Qustodio is a free parental control and Internet monitoring application for the Windows operating system. The developers claim that the program is protected against tampering. That’s a bold claim and one of the things that I investigated during tests.

When you first install the software on a Windows computer system you are asked to create an admin account. This account is used to manage and limit online access. The program asks you to select the number of children that use the computer and suggests to create a separate Windows account for the children for improved protection against tampering. New accounts can be generated effortlessly during setup.

A restart is required once the initial setup has been completed before the actual monitoring and protecting starts.

The program opens an activity summary page when the admin user is logged in that provides information about a user’s activities. This includes the type of websites visited (like tech, entertainment and social networking) as well as individual websites that have been opened by the selected user.

The Rules and Settings tab allows the parent to configure web browsing rules. Here it is for instance possible to enable or disable certain types of websites. This works similar to the filtering provided by OpenDNS where users can enable or block website categories as well. Several website categories are blocked by default, including websites related to mature content, weapons or violence. Additional categories like games, forums, health or social networking sites can be added to the block list. Another possibility is to allow access to a category but add it to a list of monitored categories. The program will send out emails whenever children are accessing websites that are listed under that category.

Qustodio’s effectiveness relies on the configuration of user accounts for each children on the system, as well as additional hardening that include blocking the computer’s BIOS with a password and disabling booting from optical discs and external drives.

This should keep most children away from bypassing the parental controls configured on the computer.

Qustodio works on the user account level which means that it provides more protection than programs designed to protect children in a specific web browser or only certain types of programs. Parents can download the free parental control software from the developer website. It is fully compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. (via)

The system administrator can monitor and record activity on all client computer systems. The default username and password are mouse and tikus. New user accounts with distinct rights can be created in the software program easily.

The admin interface itself is divided into different sections that include Internet, Printing and Reports among other sections. The Internet section opens the Internet monitoring system that displays the status of every computer system the client version of the monitoring software is running on.

A click on a system will display the current status (vacant or occupied), the IP address of the PC and additional information like the work duration on the system.

The Internet cafe monitoring software comes with basic remote PC commands. It is for example possible to send messages to one or several of the client PCs and to logoff, reboot or shutdown the client PCs.

MC3 Cyber Cafe Software is an easy to use monitoring software program that is best suited for Internet cafes. The administrator might need some time to get used to working with the software program as it offers functionality that goes beyond Internet connection monitoring.

The Home version which can monitor four client computers is free to use. Other versions are available for a price that can monitor more client systems.

Information about the software programs are directly taken from the process list and the data is stored in text files. This means that system administrators who want to analyse the traffic need to either do it manually or use a software program to do that.

The Internet logger does not provide any options which is a bit unfortunate because of the following reasons. The first reason is that there is no way of filtering applications that should not be logged by the application, the second that the logs can grow quickly. The Internet monitoring logs are saved in text files which grow depending on the traffic of the software applications. It can happen that the log file of a heavy traffic application (like utorrent or another bittorrent application) grows to a few hundred Megabytes after less than an hour. That’s obviously problematic if the Internet monitoring software has been configured to run all day long.

SoftX Internet Logger is a free Internet monitoring software that is available at the developer’s website.