<RANT>
Attention All:

I purchased Spector for the

Mac

  to monitor my childrens' computers. It phones home, and if there is more than one install - <i>even if it is on your own computers ie., your desk top and your notebook and you don't use them simultaneously</i> you will get a delightful email from Jason Ground and his explanation that you need to purchase additional license(s) or they will <i>disable all of them within 48 hours</i> (they claim a bullet capability, doesn't surprise me).

NEVER in 30 years of development have I seen a company so arrogantly tight about their licenses. Clearly, the mark of a company that desperately needs to catch every single dollar they can. All 6 of their products do the same, regardless of OS (they have products for Windoz as well). I will be looking elsewhere simply on GP: I am no abuser of developer's good hard work - I understand fair use and fair compensation. But don't fishing call home and check on me you assholes...
</RANT>

ideally you are primarily concerned about traffic to and from their computers right? I assume your boys looking at porn is not the issue, but the potential that they are getting into something bad? And your daughter getting abducted or being the porn...

I have always thought that system installs were horribly flawed, because any kid worth his/her salt would be able to get around it once they discover it, and they will discover it.

Although I have quite a few years before I have to worry about it, if I did today, I would get a solution that is between them and the inte

rnet

 , that they don't need to know about, and they can't get around. At my prior job, I was assigned the task of Spying on employees. I resisted many months, until my supervisor made my life hell. My sysadmin at the time, and I, installed ISA server and I wrote a reporting package. Got that bastard fired, yeay! The point is, noone knew, but the two of us.

I know there are some hardware solutions that you can just drop in-line that will monitor traffic. Scanning for trigger words, etc. I just don't know what any of them are.

The irony is about this product you got. You are complaining about a spyware package that phones home and is anal about its use. LOL I agree with you, just thought it was funny.

Agreed, it's a stopgap. A desperate dad in the age of the &'

;net

  trying to keep the kiddies as safe as possible for as long as possible. :sigh:



No lie. Hacker turned hypocritcal pops, bagged by crappy spyware he installed himself. Marvelous how the universe works and all. Except when *I'm* the enemy-body floating by (bad reverse reference to Sun Tzu  )

Have you not sniffed the packets then hijacked the comms so that you can continue it's use (after releasing it into the wild as payback) ?

I'd never do such. 

Had to do this with an equally asinine piece of software. I didn't really even need to use it on another computer, but both for "intellectual challenge" and "because I'd never write something that esoteric", I set up a little webserver on the local

mac

 hine and made the address it was asking for just point right to 127.0.0.1 (no place like 127.0.0.1), complete with a little index.html that echoed back what the registered version of the program expected. It was utterly simplistic though, no trading of hashes back and forth, just a "here is all the information about my system", replied to with a "ok", or "not ok" (obviously not as simple as just "ok", but you get the drift).

It is delightful to me, that, with the exception of a socket-level secured connection, the HTTP protocol sends you everything you need to know about ... um ... whatever you need to know about a server. Deligthful!

I came across (what I think is) the worst security mechanism I have ever seen today.

pseduo code is below



A simple

would soon have solved that.

Problem was I bought the sole rights to the codebase so need to incorporate somethign a little more robust

LOL this is gonna wind up being a great thread of discussion my friend

There is a better designed free software that doesn't spy on the spy's.  It is called inte

rnet

 referee and it is available at  http:inte

rnet

 referee.com.

If you configure it during the 'free trial' it will continue working after the expiration of the trial.

That's great Andy, thanks for the post and welcome to the Cache!

I agree with your rant, not making any friends with their customers with that kind of attitude, and it seems pretty contrary to the general attitude of the

Mac

  community.

The phone-home solution is the Little Snitch.  While

Mac

 s do come with ipfw integrated out of the box, Little Snitch is a friendlier user-land outbound

net

 work traffic monitor that pops up and notifies you when a new app is trying to go outbound, and allows you to immediately configure a rule for that app.

=RT=

Dig it - perfect name for the app to. That's on the list for today, thanks RT.

You're welcome, Perk.  Always glad to help out a fellow

Mac

  geek.

=RT=

Speaking of

Mac

  geeks... are you / have you gone Leopard? I just did and the jury is still out...

did you go clean install or upgrade? i am trying to decide when to upgrade my wife. er um, her box. er um, computer.
get your minds out of the gutter.

LOL rough to do after that post. ::looks around for PinkHat hehe...::

Did an upgrade on my powerbook first. Saving PinkHat's 2

mac

 hines and my dual G5 till I am happy. Upgrade went smoothly, although it took about an hour and half to do it.

Initial thoughts:
Spaces: I really like the little mini windows at the bottom of KDE, Gnome and of course the CodeTek virtual desktop for

Mac

 . This makes a lot of sense to me, so the new spaces switching metaphor and mechanics are taking a bit to get used to. Also, on my G5 I have (as you probably remember) a several monitors hooked up - spaces switches ALL of them. That's bad for me... I like having my main monitor switch but the others stay the same - it's where I keep monitors, iChat, iTunes, timers, you name it... so a quick search says that I can do it, but that I have to make the APPS screen independent ie., they don't switch they stay on top of all monitors. This works 99% well, except for Safari, which I have both a virtual desktop and several on side monitors - if Safari *as a whole* is always on top then I lose the benefit of the main screen. Argh. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen

Apple

  do a shitty job on an interface mechanism.

Speed / graphics: I see little "hitches" in the graphics that I am not comfy with yet... don't know if it's that my

mac

 hine is busy or what... but it's a core-duo, it should not have a speed issue.

Time

Mac

 hine - looking forward to that on my main box, not the laptop - can't comment yet.

Safari 3 - seems quicker, no other real difference yet.

Mail - like the RSS feeds.

All in all it was a painless evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) upgrade. I don't think the JBomb will be upset or will the 'puter puke on you. IMPORTANT: The only problem that I have heard with upgrades is a person who barely enough hard drive space - and while the upgrade was going he was copying up other stuff - the install got about 85% through and blew up because there was no longer enough room - had to do a complete clean update. I doubt this is a

Mac

 -specific thing, I could imagine this happening in any OS, but you'll want to make sure you give the installer plenty of room.

/p

Not yet.  I waited in the midnight line to get 10.3, but that was a no-brainer...anything was gonna be better performance-wise than 10.2. 

I'm hanging fire on 10.5 because the G4 733Mhz is marginal, and may not install.  My ALbook will handle it, I'm sure, but I don't use it as much at the moment.  I really should consider switching to it as my daily desktop, it'd probably handle the load better than the 733.  I use the laptop on a lap desk when I'm gaming as it helps me avoid recurring repetitive stress injury issues.

Then there is the SO's

Mac

 book.  Bonafide's a recent switcher; upgrading is not necessary for contentment.  I also need to figure out backups, as the ALbook will definitely get a clean install, and I don't think the

Mac

 book has enough room on it's external disks for a full backup.

I read your comments about Spaces.  Check out Tinkertool and see if those guys have figured out the hidden options yet.  All of the add-on "virtual desktop" softwares have died since

Apple

  announced they'd have it in Leopard--and all of them were rather barebones even so.

=RT=