Yes, ZeroCool refers to "hacking the Gibson" in the movie
Hackers. Very campy movie overall.
Most 3 year olds aren't interested in computers, or as she puts it, "puters". Juliana, my daughter, has been playing XBox and Wii since she has been able to walk, so I guess she is a bit of an oddball in that respect.
This past Christmas she finally got her own computer, which strangely enough due to Moore's law and how outdated my home desktop machine is, runs circles around my computer. I plan on "fixing" that sometime in 2008.
Anyway, up until last night she had administrator rights on her XP Pro installation that came with the computer. She has done various things to 'disable' and 'break' the system in the past few months, like disabling the Ethernet interface on accident and renaming desktop icons. Nothing too troublesome and nothing malicious.
One time while playing a game, her video card driver went into an infinite loop and blue screened the computer. I've never heard a kid so upset over something. She was screaming "
THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! WAAAAAAH!!!" The fact that she knew what it was told me that she had been paying attention to all my crazy antics at home with my beta operating systems and other mad scientist computer experiments.
Last night, she reset the permissions on all of Drive C: to lock out the SYSTEM account and Administrators at the root level. I figured this would be a good time to set up her system the right way.
I formatted her hard drive and put Vista on her computer with the latest SP1 beta build. Every device installed correctly without having to go find driver, except that the built in SoundMax HD Audio was muted on her ThinkCentre M55. A few visits to Intel's site and Lenovo's site and her system had all the latest drivers.
Windows Live OneCare Family Safety went on next. Both kids have a very short list of white-listed sites they can go to. Unfortunately, the Explorer crashing bug happened again, so I installed the
workaround. Crashing problem went away.
I reset her IE7 homepage to iCarly.com, because the site seems to be very IE-centric. I installed the Firefox 3 nightly build, set the homepage to Playhouse Disney and restored a few other of her bookmarks. AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and Nightly Tester Tool extensions went on next.
Now came the fun part - I made an administrator account for me on her computer and demoted her account to standard user. I enabled the
parental controls built into some versions of Vista. You can set time limits for computer use, control what programs can be launched, and restrict games to certain ratings. You can view what programs have been used, and for how long, and what sites were accessed.
For now, I haven't set time limits on computer use. Each kid has their own access point that their computer is wired into that connects into our "Fort Knox" wireless network. Every AP in the house is using
DD-WRT v2.4, which allows setting the times when the wireless radios are active. If I wanted, I could do finer grained control of network access so each kid could still connect to their wired devices plugged into the network switch on the AP but can't go online due to the radio being off. Eventually every system in the house will also be a
NAP client.
I limited the programs she could run to Windows Media Player, her games, and a few other applications. Anything that could be potentially damaging was left off the white-list.
So far it is working very well. If she is anything like me at the age, and all the indicators are pointing in that direction, it is only a matter of time until she figures out a way out of all the restrictions. She's too smart for her own good at times. I'll just end up filing bug reports to the OneCare Family Safety and Vista teams at Microsoft at that point.
"My 3 year old hacked your Gibson."