Pros & Cons
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- Aggregates IM accounts.
- Blocks bad words in chat.
- Limits IM to preapproved contacts.
- Blocks bad Web sites.
- Controls time spent in chat.
- Logs all chat.
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- Simple tricks negate all parental-control features, such as messaging in Web-based IM, using an off-brand browser, resetting the system clock, misspelling bad words.
Safe Chat Universal Messenger with Parental Controls Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Tech Support: | live chat |
| Type: | Personal |
Kids love to chat with their friends on various instant messaging services, but chatting with just anybody isn't safe. That oh-so-understanding new buddy may actually be a child molester trolling for new victims. Safe Chat Universal Messenger with Parental Controls is an instant-messaging aggregator that lets parents control whom the kids chat with, when they chat, and what they can say. Other parental-control features include content-based Web filtering and blocking specific programs. While the IM aggregation feature is adequate, the app's protective features folded up in testing.
Installation is fast and simple, though the two-stage registration/activation process is cumbersome. For each of one to three children, the setup wizard gathers a profile of screen name and password information for MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and ICQ. Of course you can enter or change the account information later if you prefer. Note, though, that in order to complete this step you must know the screen names and passwords for your children's IM accounts. You do? Really? All their screen names?—
Instant Messaging Convenience
Chances are good that your children's friends don't all use the same instant-messaging service. Rather than have three or four different IM clients running at once, clamoring for attention and desktop space, an IM aggregator can manage all their accounts in one place. The free version of Safe Chat offers IM aggregation alone, without the parental-control element, and it works fairly well. You can easily connect or disconnect all of the accounts associated with a profile and set the online/away status for all of them at once or individually. Safe Chat organizes IM conversations into tabs within the main window. All contacts appear in one big list organized by service and folder: Launching a conversation is as easy as double-clicking the contact name.
Even here Safe Chat has some limitations. The free Pidgin (née GAIM) and Trillian utilities let you monitor multiple accounts that use the same service: You could manage three different AIM accounts, for example. Safe Chat allows just one account of each type per profile. Pidgin supports almost a dozen additional services, including Google Talk and MySpace IM—now there's a real "universal messenger"!
Another big limitation that might not bother you as the parent seeking to control your children's IM adventures will surely annoy said children: Safe Chat's hard limit of 128 characters per message. I found myself typing away with no warning that it was discarding my text. At least it doesn't truncate incoming messages. In addition, I found that each message I sent appeared twice in the message window. Zihtec tech support confirmed that this happens occasionally, but that it usually goes away by itself. However, I found that it didn't go away, even when I followed instructions to uninstall and reinstall the product. For straight IM aggregation without parental control, I'd choose Trillian or Pidgin over Safe Chat.—
Keeping Chat Safe
Safe Chat tries to set itself apart by adding parental control to instant messaging. When using Safe Chat, your kids can talk only to contacts that you've actively authorized. You pick authorized contacts from a master list of contacts for all currently connected accounts, but doing so is a serious pain. You can't multi-select contacts and add them all at once. You can't double-click a contact to add it. And you can't drag it to the authorized list. Rather, you must select one contact at a time and click a button to put it on the list. Wait, did you already add that one? If both lists are long it's hard to tell. Once you've completed this tedious step, the kids can chat with their friends but not with strangers, and Safe Chat will log both sides of every conversation.
By default Safe Chat blocks over 50 specific keywords and phrases, replacing them with asterisks in incoming or outgoing messages. You can edit the list of keywords and you can have it block the entire message rather than just masking the offending phrase. It blocks pictures in the message window and prevents IM-based file transfer unless you allow it. It also blocks the chat feature on about 150 sites, among them Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook. The Access Hours feature can limit chat to a single time span for each day of the week, so the kids don't sneak down in the middle of the night. Finally you can set it to alert you when someone accesses the parental-control settings. That way, if the kids plunder your parental password, you'll know about it.
The kids can open and view most of the parental-control settings, but they can't change anything without the password. They can see the access hours, for example, and the master and authorized contact lists. But since the scrollbars on the contact lists are disabled, they can only see the first few entries. Quite reasonably, they can't view the list of blocked phrases.
Safe Chat can manage only IM conversations that take place within the program. It doesn't operate at the protocol level, the way
Browser and Program Control
The remaining parental-control features function even when the Safe Chat utility isn't in use. These include blocking known bad Web sites, content-based site blocking, and program control. You reach them by right-clicking the Safe Chat icon in the system tray.
The site-blocking feature isn't remotely like what most parental products offer. Full-featured parental-control products like Net Nanny and Safe Eyes block thousands of sites using a huge database that matches sites to specific categories. Safe Chat just blocks its local blacklist of 150-odd sites. You can add more, of course, but what parent has the time or ability to identify and enter thousands of bad sites?
Clearly this puny list isn't sufficient by itself, so Safe Chat also scans Web pages for the presence of about 120 "bad" words and phrases. When Net Nanny hits a page that's not in its category database, it uses full textual analysis of the page content—all words, good and bad—to assign a category. Safe Chat just counts on its fingers and blocks the page when it sees a specific number of bad words, three by default. If this feature erroneously blocks a valid site (and it will), you can add that site to the Safe Sites whitelist.
Like
Unsafe Chat
For testing purposes I configured Safe Chat to manage four IM accounts, one of each type, and verified that it does correctly mask out offensive words and phrases. Attempting to chat with a buddy not on the approved list got a curt warning "Cannot talk to this contact." If I tried to chat during a nonapproved time, Safe Chat simply wouldn't connect. It did log all conversations, organized by date and service. So far, so good.
But teens hate to hear "no," and they'll hate this program. It censors their language, limits the time they can chat, cuts them off from friends, and spies on them. This means war! Taking the part of the frustrated teen I tried to break Safe Chat, and it went all to pieces. Any reasonably bright child could get around every single one of its protective measures. Safe Chat can't censor keywords if I choose to misspell them while leaving the meaning clear. Hot d@mn! If Safe Chat says it's the wrong time to chat, I simply change the system clock. It did block every third-party IM client I could find, but so what: By using a Web-based chat client like Meebo.com, Imhaha.com, or Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, I could chat with anybody at any time and not worry about Safe Chat eavesdropping. Safe Chat is down for the count.
I then went into a full-fledged hacking frenzy. I found the lists of blocked keywords, blocked sites, and authorized contacts stored as simple text files on disk. I couldn't simply delete or change them; I got "Access denied" because Safe Chat had them locked. I couldn't terminate the locking process because a "buddy" process immediately restored it. But by bringing in a free hacking tool I managed to empty the blocked lists and add my own authorized contacts outside the program. Safe Chat was pwned! Think your teen's l337 skillz aren't up to this challenge? You may be right...—
Unsafe Browsing
Beating up the Web-filtering features took a lot less effort. Safe Chat claims to filter Web sites in Netscape, IE7, and Firefox 2 and block the use of unsupported browsers. In practice, I found that its protection was spotty: It might block a site in one browser and not in another, or block it at one time and allow it 5 minutes later. Pages bulging with nude pictures can get past Safe Chat as long as they don't use coarse language in their text. It did shut down Opera every time I tried to launch it, but it let a number of lesser-known browsers launch and surf with no filtering whatsoever. Your kids can completely negate Safe Chat's browser-based protection by switching to an off-brand browser.
If your kids don't have the skills or inclination to hack Safe Chat's protection, you'll have a different set of problems, because it blocks many pages that it shouldn't. For example, it decided a PC Magazine article about IM aggregators was inappropriate, and it blocked access to reviews that described products as "sexy." Many valid articles on other sites got the axe because a reader comment way down the page used profanity. The simple-minded count-the-bad-words filter just doesn't cut it.
The program-blocking feature fared no better. I set it to block a program, confirmed that it did so, and then made a copy of the program with a different name. Webroot Parental Controls wasn't fooled by a simple trick like this, but Safe Chat fell for it. And by copying cmd.exe and regedit.exe to cmx.exe and regedix.exe I gained access to Command Prompt and the Registry Editor. That's terrible! On the plus side, the Safe Chat Control feature must be implemented differently, as I couldn't manage to launch a renamed copy of Trillian or Pidgin.
So, what we have here is an instant-messaging aggregator that's not as flexible or easy to use as its free competition, with a dollop of parental control dumped top of it. But the parental-control elements are limited in scope and easily avoided by smart kids. You can do better.
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Final Thoughts
Safe Chat Universal Messenger with Parental Controls
Safe Chat is an instant-messaging aggregator with parental-control features added. Its free competitors do better at managing multiple IM accounts. Worse still, the parental-control elements are limited in scope and can be easily avoided by smart kids. You can do better.