Best Free Parental Filter

Best Free Parental Filter The stand-out choice in this category is K9 Web Protection [1] by Blue Coat Systems. It's a web based service that uses a special driver installed on your PC to redirect all your browsing through K9's servers where it is filtered for content. This means that the filtering works for any browser installed on your PC. The actual filtering itself is highly customizable from a password protected control panel at K9's web site with over 15 selectable categories plus the ability to restrict or permit individual sites. Full reports on sites visited are also available from the control panel. The filtering seems quite accurate; I only found one site in an hour of browsing which I felt should not have been blocked. I also liked the optional blocking of Spyware and Adware sites. I tried a few obvious ways of crippling the filter such as uninstalling the product or disenabling the driver, with no success, which is comforting to parents. I suspect though, that a determined tech-savvy teenager might eventually find a solution. The only real downside was the slight slowing down of my browsing as a result of it being re-routed through the K9 servers. This will mainly be of concern to dial-up users. If that's you then you might like to try Naomi [2] that has the advantage of filtering locally. In my tests it caught all the offensive sites I tried though occasionally it caught an innocent site as well. Like K9, it's also difficult to disable. As with K9 I tried the obvious tricks of defeating the filter by terminating the Naomi service and deleting the autostart entry without success. Naomi also works with any browser on your system not just Internet Explorer. On the downside, it filters by terminating the browser session without warning whenever a banned site is encountered. I found this a real pain especially when I had several browser tabs open and lost the lot! Naomi is certainly a very capable parental filter but on balance I preferred K9's smarter logic, greater configurability and friendlier behavior. Modem users will however, appreciate Naomi's speed advantage.
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[1] http://www.k9webprotection.com/ [2] http://www.radiance.m6.net/