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Parents the winner in Leopard, Vista showdown

Steve Borsch, a father from Minneapolis and CEO of a consulting company, said he was seriously looking at buying a software package of parental controls to manage computer usage by his 13-year-old son, whom Borsch had caught looking at risque anime sites a couple of times. But he waited for the release of Apple's Leopard because he's a fan of the Mac and OS-level controls, which add up to one fewer moving part on the computer, he said.

He set up an account for his son, and the controls are password-protected. With Leopard, he restricts his son from unfettered access to the Web and applications such as file-sharing service BitTorrent. He has also set allowances for sites like Anime-Planet.com, a cartoon site, but blocked a similar URL without a dash between the words, which is a pornographic site. On school days, he restricts computer use between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m.; on weekends, his son must stay offline from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m.

After using the Mac parental controls for several weeks, he said he particularly likes the ability to control his son's computer from his own, or remote controls.

"Rather than having me run up to his room and open system preferences, he'll yell down to me that he wants to visit a particular site, and I'll just add a site on the approved list. It's great," Borsch said.

He also likes the ability to see every application his son uses.

"If he decides he can slip one by me and download an application that I haven't purposely set up in parental controls, I can see whatever app he runs in (log files). Or I can log on and share his screen and he doesn't know it. There's a great deal of oversight I could have. In my opinion, kids have to play and explore, but I have the controls in place to make sure he doesn't wander down the wrong road."

When Microsoft released Vista, it unveiled its most extensive parental controls yet. It added settings that enable parents to regulate which sites a child can use, almost to a granular effect. For example, a parent can block Web sites that contain references to tobacco or alcohol.

Laemmel uses the Vista parental controls with his 12-year-old daughter, but he takes the trusting approach. He looks at the monthly activity reports that are newly available with Vista controls, but that's all.

Still, no system of protection is perfect. Some people have reported issues with Leopard's parental controls hogging memory and CPU usage, according to Josh Tigford, owner of the Apple Blog based in Denver. But Apple said it hadn't heard such complaints.

Conrad Sykes, an 18-year-old from Spokane, Wash., already has reported on his blog TheComputerKid.com about how kids can get around Vista's parental controls. He suggests that kids can work around the controls by using Web proxies, applications that encrypt Web site access.

"There are thousands of Web proxies, and it would become a full-time job for a parent to block all the proxies," Sykes said.

Neither Leopard nor Vista parental controls address the increasing mobility of devices in the home. More and more kids use handheld devices with built-in Web browser and Wi-Fi capabilities, making it possible for them to go online nearly anywhere without supervision.

For example, a parent of a 15-year-old said his son saved up money to buy an iPod Touch. When configuring the device, his son asked for the home Wi-Fi network password, and realized that he didn't have much control over his new device.

"I did not give him the key to our home network," the dad said. "I did my research to find out that there isn't much I can do technically. I could put up a firewall in my house but what is to keep kids from jumping online at a friend's house, or McDonald's?"

An Apple representative said the company hasn't offered parental controls for devices like the iTouch, but the Safari browser bookmarks could pass from the computer to the device. Similarly, Microsoft's parental controls aren't mobile, but the company recently introduced settings for the Xbox.

Parental controls in operating systems are "a good step forward for parents," Collier said. "But it's not a panacea. There are so many devices that they can access the Net with and so many places they can access the Net."

Send insights or tips on this topic to stefanie.olsen@cnet.com.

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