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Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Browser Killer v1.0

Browser Killer V1.1

Updated to V1.1

As parents we want the best for our children and we want them to do the best they can in school or wherever they receive their education. The sad fact is that children need guidance and order and as parents we must do the best we can to enforce this. We all know this is almost impossible to control nowadays as we can not be around them 24 hours a day.

One of the major problems I see is distraction, mainly by the internet. Regardless of what your children say they don't always need the internet to do their homework. Sure, if they have something they need to research that's about the only time they should be online, but if your children are doing most of their homework online someone should be checking their teachers curriculum.

Since we can't be there all the time I have created a utility to detect and kill web browsers. Every 10 seconds (to reduce system lag) my utility will run silently in the background and then go through a series of browser detection and kill loops. Kids are smart and getting smarter and therefor I had to design a somewhat hidden program that runs in cmd instead of its' own executable.

Usage:

This is a portable application which is meant to be hidden so you should store this somewhere you will remember, but where your kids might not think to look. The best ways to use this are:

  • When you're home:
    • Have your children leave the room and start the kap.exe.
    • It runs as cmd.exe in Task Manager which could be anything so your kids have no idea that it is your process.
  • When you're not home:
    • It's a good idea to set homework times and set this to run via task scheduler.
      Learn about Task Scheduler here
  • To end:
    • I have included an endkap.exe which will kill all instances of cmd.exe. (endkap.exe now kills via its' specific PID instead of all instances of cmd.exe)
    • You can kill in your task manager by killing the cmd.exe that is the parent process of timeout.exe.
    • You can start a new cmd.exe to kill with the command
      taskkill /f /im cmd.exe
      or set the same command in Task Scheduler when you want it to stop.

Security Issue:

The behavior of this application stops access to the internet via browsers and therefor is flagged by some antiviruses as false-positives (AV false-positives Google search). To get around this just (restore if necessary) make an exception in your anti-virus program.

Notes:

Creates a kill.log file in the users Documents folder which logs which browser is killed by time and date so that you can see if and how your kids are trying to be sneaky or not.

This is the beta version, alpha has been tested and worked with no bugs in Windows Vista 32bit and Windows 7 64bit. Please email all bugs to faithnomoread@yahoo.com or leave a comment in the section below.
Browsers included so far:

  • Internet Explorer
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • Safari
  • Maxthon
  • Avant
  • Torch
  • Midori
There are more I could add, but most your children will never even hear of.

Release Notes:

V1.0 - First beta release
V1.1 - Added kill.log file in your Documents folder and endkap now kills Browser Killer via its' unique PID instead of kill all instances of cmd.

Download:

Icons I created:

kapno
Icon for KAP
kapend
Icon for ENDKAP

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