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Snooper of the Month
System Spy II from Diplodock
| The Snooper of the Month review is a monthly article reviewing a new piece of snoopware. All reviews are written by Jerry Nicean of Trapware. |
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System Spy II from Diplodock - This
snooper records a lot of information about system-type events and
may be quite useful to a sophisticated user who needed this kind
of information. For the typical snooping context, this snooper may
provide too much information.
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September 2002 - System Spy II records operating
system activity, application activity, keyboard activity and mouse
activity on your PC. As will be shown below, System Spy II records
plenty of information about certain events, almost too much information
for many people. System Spy II does not take screenshots.
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| When first installed, the System Spy II snooper from Diplodock is installed so that it is visible in the task list and its icon is visible in the system tray when running. As shown below, when in the task list, System Spy II shows up as SystemSpy: |
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| There is an option in System Spy II to configure the snooper to start in invisible mode where it will not show up in the task list nor will its icon be visible in the system tray. Once this option is selected, the only way to make the snooper visible again is to create a filed called "makevisible.txt" and place it in the System Spy II folder. The next time it restarts it becomes visible. |
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There are two different components that come with
this snooper: the System Spy II snooper and the System Spy II Log
File Analyzer. System Spy II does the monitoring and allows you
to configure how the system is monitored. The Log File Analyzer
allows you to view the log files to see what has happened on the
computer.
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| Below is a screenshot of the System Spy II interface. The Processes tab shows you the running processes. The RAM/CPU tab displays information on available memory and CPU usage. The available drives on the computer are shown under the Disks tab. The Events tab presents to the user system, mouse and keyboard events. The Options tab allows a user to configure System Spy 2 (e.g., refresh monitoring timer values, security options, invisible mode). |
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| The System Spy II Log File Analyzer is used to view what has veen recorded using System Spy II. The top portion of the System Spy II Log File Analyzer is shown below. It includes an explorer-type tree in the left window with the right window display information corresponding to what is selected in the left window. The three main types of events to view are Mouse Events, Keyboard Events and System Events. In the window shown immediately below, the System Events tab is highlighted and "Create Window Events" are being displayed. This is probably too much information for the typical user. |
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The Mouse Events log is an example of how System
Spy II provides too much information to the user. As you can see,
it records the X and Y coordinates of the mouse, the Windows message
and the button pressed.I guess it is possible that a user could
want this much information, but I can't imagine many such situations.
One improvement here may be simply displaying to the user the mouse
activity and what program was being interacted with through the
mouse (e.g., "mouse event - Internet Explorer"). This
amount of information that is currently given may actually be useful
to software developers, but probably not to the average user wanting
to use a snooper.
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| The Keyboard Events log is similar to the Mouse Event log. It does record keystrokes in the log. As with the Mouse Event log, I think this could be improved if System Spy II condensed the information so that it was more digestible. |
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| System Spy II would not configure itself to autostart on the system we tested it with. So we had to manually configure our system so that it would autostart. Either there is a bug in the program or the user interface should be improved so that a user doesn't think the program will configure itself to autostart. |
| As far as operating system limitations go, the documentation said that System Spy II was designed for Windows 95/98/ME, but not Windows 2000, NT or XP. |
| For those of you who would like to try System Spy II from Diplodock, there is a free trial, but it only lasts for 7 uses (not 7 days, just 7 uses). When we went to check on the order page, we were shown the following message: "This product has been taken offline or has been deleted by the vendor." |
| As far as activity monitoring, this product seems to be more suited to developers and sophisticated users who really want to know what kind of system events and system-type parameters are being processed. For the consumer who is looking for a snooper to put on their computer to watch what goes on there, this will probably give them too much information. |
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