HA! What a great idea...of course, he'll likely find some "erotica" sites to visit.

Ooooohhhhhhhh........... ASCII porno!

The clever way to circumvent all of this is to use your mobile phone as a modem and set up the computer to pair with the phone. Now when you need to do your personal affairs, you simply connect to the internet via your phone modem. This way, you will be the only one logging your personal use. If your boss walks by, you simply switch to Excel or something. No one would ever suspect that you are logging on via the phone and no one will ever bother to ask why isn't his computer connected to the internet most of the time. They will simply think that you don't need it.

Mate you are missing the point of this whole conversation. This is not a thread on how to prevent the use of personal use but rather the honesty and productivity aspect form the employers point of view.

Interesting to see how this is developing.

Rather than delete the Private Browsing menu item, why not make it so that it is still there but doesn't actually do anything? That way he will think he is using private browsing when in fact Safari will be logging everything. Hey presto you have evidence of what he has been doing and you can discipline him.

I apologize for having perhaps been guilty for diverting the point of Steiner's post. My point was really more general, and I confused the matter by applying the general point (which I still think is important--that we can't expect technology to provide easy solutions to problems whose roots lie in human agency) to the particulars of Steiner's description of an employee behaving irresponsibly. The practical nature of his question was not really needed to make my general point, and it was perhaps a mistake to jump on the opportunity to make this point in this post. Maybe the Coat Room would truly be a more appropriate posting site for my observations on this issue. In any case, it wasn't my intention to obscure this thread, so I apologize for having done so.

Joe VanZandt

Dang, Bob, how do you guys know this stuff??! I want to go to the school you went to! Amazing trick, and I suspect that it's good for removing any of the menu items you don't want. Thanks for this tip.

One way to learn this sort of thing is to go back and read through the huge archive of tips on the main macosxhints site. Or buy the book which assembles the best tips into a more coherent format.

There's a book created from this site? I want it! Where can I buy it? I did a search through the site, as well as Amazon, but couldn't find anything related to macosxhints.

Thanks, edalzell. Just grabbed a copy.

lost on step 5
 

:(Can you help me with step 5, I cannot figure this out. I don't even understand it. Thanks

Pull Down the Safari menu and select Private Browsing…

Hello all. I was searching for a way to disable private browsing for my kids and the Mac store employees as well as tech support said it was impossible. I'm so happy to have found this! So please pardon my ignorance gentleman, but I'm not computer savvy at all. My young children understand more than I do. With the above steps, I got as far as step 4 - I have no idea how to open MainMenu.nib in an interface builder.

I would be very grateful if someone could please explain this in a bit more detail as well as the following steps just to make sure I do it correctly without hurting anything else. Thank you so much!

Your are probably looking for the "Interface Builder" application aren't you? The application will be found in a the Developer folder either in your Applications folder or at the root level of your HD.
In the Developer folder, there is another Applications folder, the Interface Builder.app should be in there.
If you don't have anything in the Developer folder, check to see if you have the Xcode Tools installed. It may be in a folder in your Applications folder named Installers. In the Xcode Tools folder look for Packages, then double click on the "DeveloperTools.pkg"

Getting Firefox to fix this is incorrect. In fact it is better at getting rid of history than Safari with a free plug-in that the development site suggests.

Along with some of the suggestions I read above you should be able to go into the firewall logs (if you have one) or your network switch and examine the logs. Most better switches through in free admin software that lets you review who is going where and for how long in various forms. Generally tracked by MAC address and IP address.

To get around companies firewalls, use your cell phone.
 

Just to add; many people are using the cell phone/wireless broadband method to check personal email these days. So many companies are locking down the networks that you can't check email, surf youtube etc.

Unless companies start banning cell phones and PDAs (like iPhones), that is the best way to surf pr0n or check email without your boss knowing.:D

Uhm, your kids can still delete the history within a couple of mouse clicks even if you remove the PRIVATE BROWSING feature.

The best way (other than slapping your kids around) is to implement browsing policies on your router. On most Linksys routers, you can set up browsing schedules, block ip addresses of websites, etc.

I've been asked to do this so many times for parents, I'm seriously thinking about starting a side business doing just this.

I know they can still delete things but I've installed a program called spector which records snap shots of the screen for me to review, but again, they're smarter than I am - they figured out that when the CPU(?) spikes that it's taking a snapshot and they started quitting things in the activity monitor until the spikes stopped, thus stopping the snapshots. Then they can use private browsing or just delete the history. I set up an administrator account so they have to have my password to quit programs now, but I'd just like to add the extra precaution of disabling the private browsing.

I downloaded xcode tools, at least I think I did. But I'm still lost when it comes to the double clicking on mainmenu.nib to open it in interface builder.

I would very much appreciate someone taking the time to explain this to me. Thank you!

If you truly want control over your children's use of the computer, create one (1) Administrative account with a secure password and remove administrative privileges from their accounts. This way, only you have the power to use programs like Activity Monitor.

In order to edit the mainmenu.nib, you need to install the Developer's Tools from your OS X disc. this will add utilities, including Interface Builder for this project.