[Solved] How do i creat a program that can stop people from using other programs [closed]

Question

Locking people out of an environment is very hard. Doubly so in Windows. Even in high schools nowadays you’re gonna have to deal with script kiddies which will find ways to outsmart your app.

I once worked in a college and I saw the kids there spending more time playing games than paying attention to classes, so I made a Windows service that would monitor the processes in the machine. I kept a black list with the process names of their favorite games and emulators. If such a process was opened, my service would pick a random amount of time (between 30 and 90 seconds) and start a countdown. At the end of the countdown, it killed the process (the kids usually got the hint after 4 or 5 tries). This was extremely frustrating and infuriating to them, which I found through experimenting to be more effective at getting them to stop with the gaming during class than just simply blocking their games.

So my suggestion is this: you could keep a white list of allowed processes, and close/block any process which is not on the list. Bonus if you have a way for the school staff to add or remove programs from this list.

Accepted Answer

Locking people out of an environment is very hard. Doubly so in Windows. Even in high schools nowadays you’re gonna have to deal with script kiddies which will find ways to outsmart your app.

I once worked in a college and I saw the kids there spending more time playing games than paying attention to classes, so I made a Windows service that would monitor the processes in the machine. I kept a black list with the process names of their favorite games and emulators. If such a process was opened, my service would pick a random amount of time (between 30 and 90 seconds) and start a countdown. At the end of the countdown, it killed the process (the kids usually got the hint after 4 or 5 tries). This was extremely frustrating and infuriating to them, which I found through experimenting to be more effective at getting them to stop with the gaming during class than just simply blocking their games.

So my suggestion is this: you could keep a white list of allowed processes, and close/block any process which is not on the list. Bonus if you have a way for the school staff to add or remove programs from this list.