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Keeping your family safer online

If you have a family and you worry about keeping them safer online, Windows Live Family Safety can help you do that. If you’re just getting started using Family Safety, or you’ve already been using it for awhile, there’s a terrific article on the Windows Help and How-to site called Staying safer online. In it, Gloria Boyer from the Windows team tells the story of how she set up Family Safety for her sister’s household.

When Gloria set up her sister’s computer she created separate Windows accounts for each family member.  Family Safety works better with separate user accounts (because parents can view reports about the sites each child visits). Plus, this means that each person can also:

• Customize their desktop: Little kids can set a picture of their favorite cartoon character as their desktop background; the older kids can use a picture of their favorite band.
• Set up their own Start menu and taskbar.
• Set their own Internet favorites. Parents’ money management websites won’t appear on the kids’ Favorites lists, and CartoonNetwork.com won’t be on the parents’ lists.

If your family’s used to using just one account, it might sound like a big deal to ask everyone to use separate accounts and passwords.  But there are a few ways to make switching between accounts easier for your family:

• When you leave the computer, lock it using this quick keyboard shortcut: Hold down the Windows key and press the L key.
• Use Fast User Switching so you can switch right to a different account without logging off, which would close down your work.
• Or log off by clicking the Windows Start button, pointing to the arrow next to the Lock icon, and then clicking Log Off.

The next person who wants to use the computer is then free to log on with their own user name and password, and all of their desktop settings and favorites will be just where they left them.

How does all this locking and switching work with Family Safety? Great!  When you switch to a different Windows account, you are still signed in to the Family Safety Filter, no more signing in and out. That’s one less thing to do, and when you have a family to take care of, you have more than enough to do!

-Sylvia French
Windows Live Team

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, How-to, Story, Windows Live, Family Safety

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Family Safety,security,Fast user switching,user accounts,Windows,sign-in

 

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The web has been a real learning experience for my family. The kids learn about geodes and where Dora lost her friendship bracelet, while I learn about malware and phishing. Fortunately, Windows Live Family Safety lets me block the sites I know are dangerous for them and allow the ones I know they like and are safe. And if the kids try to do an end-run around mom and check out other sites, I know right away with activity reports.

But even with all this great defensive planning, there are hackers out there working just as hard to find new ways to do their own end-run. Family Safety and Internet Explorer work great together because their always-evolving security features help me guard against these new hacker tactics. Today, the new Internet Explorer 8 is being released with some great new ways to protect against hackers. There’s SmartScreen that helps protect my family from socially-engineered attacks like malware and phishing, and other technologies that help protect my PC from drive-by attacks like cross-site scripting and ClickJacking.

SmartScreen helps me protect my kids from more malware than ever before. Malware is hard enough for adults to identify; kids have an even harder time. A game site is a game site to them. Free stuff is endlessly alluring.  How are they supposed to know that the cool screensaver they are downloading isn’t really a cool screensaver, but a covert, potentially harmful piece of software that they are putting on the family computer where your banking information is located, right next to the LEGO blueprints and the sledding pictures?

Internet Explorer 8 works against ClickJacking and cross-site scripting technologies to prevent Junior from clicking on a picture of a Pokémon and being taken to another website without realizing it.  When Junior thought he was clicking Pikachu, he may have actually clicked something else: buying something from another site, changing settings on your browser or computer, or being shown inappropriate advertisements. It’s complicated, but Internet Explorer 8 lets website developers protect their sites from these kinds of attacks by preventing their legitimate pages from being “framed.” All these new features in Internet Explorer 8 work together to help identify threats for you and your kids, block them, or just warn you so you can avoid a digital disaster. Once Internet Explorer 8 is installed, there’s nothing more to configure, nothing extra for you to buy or download or install, it just works. Downloading and upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 only takes a few minutes! 

If all this has made you curious about the new security features in Internet Explorer 8 and the new kinds of malicious software technologies that they guard against, you can also read this white paper for all the details.

Oh, and by the way, I am also posting this on the Windows Live team blog, which has more great info about using Windows Live on the web.

- Sylvia F., Mom and writer, Windows Live Family Safety

Now that the newest version of Family Safety has released, the Beta will be shut down. If you’re still running the Beta version of the software, please access the released version at http://download.live.com/familysafety. If you’re not sure what version you’re running, here is how to check.

1. Open the Family Safety Filter and sign in if needed
2. Under the help menu (white question mark inside a blue circle) access “About Family Safety”
3. Ensure the version number you’re running is 14.0.8052.1208 or later.

If you're a Family Safety customer installing via Windows Live Essentials, there is a temporary issue which may cause setup to fail. The Family Safety team is working on resolving this issue, so the information posted here will only be needed for a short time.

Update: Here is the kb article which references this issue.

If the Windows Live Essentials setup fails and you see the following error "Check to be sure you are connected to the Internet. You cannot download Windows Live programs unless you're connected to the Internet," it might be because you have Family Safety installed and running on your computer which is blocking the download of the installation files. The easiest way to work around this is to do the following:

1)      Make sure that your internet connection is working and you can browse to a website.

2)      If you are not able to browse to a website, it could be because the setup process closed Family Safety. In this case, you can either open Family Safety and make sure you are logged in or, alternatively, you can open Family Safety and just turn off the filter.

3)      Run the Windows Live Essentials setup again and select "Ignore any open programs" when you get to the screen titled "Please close these programs."

Here’s an example involving how the Family Safety filter and the browsing you may do online that is sometimes a sticking point for new users. As you know, once you’ve installed the Family Safety filter(*), you’ll need to sign in as a member of the family in order to start browsing online. For this example, the family has the following settings:

Parent: All websites allowed, no blocked sites

Child: Small list of allowed websites, rest of the Internet is blocked

If you’ve signed in as the parent, all browsing will be available to you. Most Windows Live sites including Family Safety have a “sign in” link in the upper right corner. You may have signed in to the Family Safety filter as the parent, but now that the Internet is available to you, you can sign in to any Windows Live (or other) website as yourself, or someone else, or even your child. The Internet is available to you fully, there is no restriction on who or how you sign in to a particular website.

Question: Given that you’re signed in as the parent with the Family Safety filter, what websites will be allowed for you if you sign in to a Windows Live website as your child?

Answer: You’ll still be getting the parent’s settings.

As a new user, if your expectation was that signing in to the child via a Windows Live website changes who you’re signed in as with the filter, it will appear that the Family Safety filter is not working. In actuality, the Family Safety filter is working, just with the more permissive parent settings.

As a note of assurance, it can be hard to keep track on the web exactly what information gets beamed down to your local machine, and what information stays up there. It can be hard to tell the difference between using a program and changing settings on a website, especially if you’ve been working with a program such as Family Safety that uses the website to CONTROL the functionality of the filter which is local to your machine. Please explore how this works and let us know your thoughts on signing in (both on the web and with the filter) in the comments.

(*) The Family Safety filter is a program that you download and install when you choose to install Family Safety on your computer.

- Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager, Family Safety

Over here on the Family Safety team, we hear a lot about accounts. There are many different types. In general, when someone is talking about an online “account” they mean a username and password pair that gives them personalized access to products and services. Probably the oldest kind of account online is an e-mail account. Your username is your e-mail address (or just the front part, minus the @domain stuff), and your password is something you picked out and hopefully you change it regularly. To get your e-mail, you need to enter these two pieces of information into the system. Accounts are used for purchases, chat, and generally membership in anything online. One person can have many accounts, and it’s likely this is not uncommon even in children.

Looking at Family Safety software at Microsoft, there are still a lot of different accounts involved. If you’re using Windows Vista parental controls, you apply those controls to a Windows account that your child uses. Some household computers may not have that additional Windows account until the administrator realizes they want to apply parental controls. One thing that Windows does well is to provide an option to create a new Windows account while you’re in the process of setting up parental controls. It would be a pain to have to navigate somewhere else to do this and then come back to setting up parental controls. Windows accounts can be limited accounts or administrator accounts. Administrators can do things like install and uninstall software. You can see how if you’re creating a new Windows account for your child, you’d want that account to be Limited. All Windows accounts can have passwords, but not all do. If your machine has an administrator account without a password, it’s the same as elevating the privileges of all the limited accounts on your machine.

Other Family Safety services from Microsoft are based on online ids called a Passport or Windows Live Account. This is also referred to as a “Windows Live ID.” Of course you have to sign on to your computer somehow. You’ll still use a Windows account for that. After you’ve done that, to access your online services with Windows Live such as Hotmail and Messenger, you’ll use a Windows Live ID. It’s a bit confusing because the word Windows is used in both places. The word to focus on is Live… the reason why this term is helpful is it sounds like something that is alive, that can move around from place to place. A Windows Live ID is useful from any machine with online access, whereas if you create a Windows account, it’s local so it’s only applicable to that one machine.

In usability tests we sometimes see users get hung up on prompts for a Windows Live ID, especially if they have just been through a setup process with their Windows account. Say you create a Windows account called Mom. Then you install Family Safety software from Windows Live and are prompted to sign in. What do you sign in with, is it Mom again? One thing we can do a better job with is help people understand what we’re asking for every time they’re prompted to sign in. Key to doing this is to explain the difference between the different types of accounts. Similar to your Windows account, you can select your Windows Live account to remember your password, which also effectively lets anyone with access to your machine sign in online as you. This does not sound important… after all, these people are invited into your home… but keep in mind for Family Safety, the account settings are maintained online. If you said “no” to a request from your child to view a website, that setting can be changed to “yes” if the settings see appropriate credentials.

Given this landscape, we’d like to ask users of Windows Live OneCare Family Safety how they use their accounts.

Specifically:

1) Do you have a separate Windows account for each family member, or do some still share even after installing Windows Live OneCare Family Safety?

2) Do all these Windows accounts have their own passwords?

3) Are you aware of the privileges between administrator and limited accounts, and do the children end up with limited accounts?

4) If your children are too young to type a password, what choices have you made to work around that?

5) When prompted for a Windows Live ID, do you know what you’re being asked for?

6) Do you know if your child has membership accounts online? (Hint: The Windows Live OneCare Family Safety activity report can provide you with a list of websites your child has visited).

7) Make up your own question and answer it here!

Thanks in advance for the feedback and for taking the time to contribute.

- Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager, Family Safety

The good news is, the Family Safety team has been working hard on the next release. The bad news is, this has not left a lot of time for posting to this blog and we apologize for that. While we’re working on some new posts, we have the following suggestions:

· For individual support, please access https://support.live.com/

· We’ll keep comments open on this blog. We welcome comments as it can be a great way for individuals to share information with the entire community

· Suggestions for new blog posts are encouraged!

Best,

- The Family Safety Team

We have noticed an increase in users experiencing issues with Webkinz being blocked by Family Safety Settings.  The reason for this is that Webkinz does not use URLs for their websites but rather uses IP addresses. There are a few IP addresses for Webkinz on the kid’s safe sites list, but webkinz can change or expand the list at any time.

The best way to allow access to the Webkinz site is to check the exact IP address shown in the block message for Family Safety users that have IE 7 installed. This is the address that should be added to the "Allow" list.  If another change occurs on the Webkinz side, this new address should be added as well.  Unfortnately, there is no way for Microsoft to anticipate what IP addresses Webkinz will use, and allow them to eliminate this issue.

If you have any problems with allowing IP addresses, please feel free to seek help through our Support contact at http://support.live.com