Many businesses set up a PC for use as a public Internet kiosk by launching IE in Kiosk mode. To try this, simply enter iexplore -k in the Start menu’s Run dialog, appending the URL of the Web site you want it to open. You could also create a shortcut containing this command line. The resulting window will totally fill the screen with the selected page—no frame, no title bar, no menu, and no toolbar. If the page in question is a local HTML page without links, users can’t click to navigate anywhere.
Savvy users get around this limitation by controlling IE through the keyboard Ctrl-O or Ctrl-L will launch the Open window, which you can then use to open any Web site you want. Ctrl-N would open a new window that’s not in Kiosk mode, and Shift-clicking a link would open that link in a non-Kiosk window. Also, Alt-F4 or Ctrl-W would close the Kiosk-mode window.
A good admin will lock down these key combinations by applying restrictions in the Registry. To do this, launch RegEdit from the Start menu’s Run dialog; navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft Internet Explorer\Restrictions; and find or create each of the following DWORD values, setting its data to 1 to enable the restriction:
· NoBrowserClose (disables closing the browser window)
· NoBrowserContextMenu (disables right-click context menu)
· NoFileOpen (disables use of Ctrl-O or Ctrl-L to launch an arbitrary URL)
· NoOpenInNewWnd (disables opening a link in a new window via Ctrl-N or Shift-click)
A user who attempts one of these restricted actions will get a warning stating “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.” You may need to restart the computer to make it recognize changes in these values. Of course users can still enter Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager and end the process.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment