Internet Filters Keep Children Safe on the Web
This weekend we had a house full of children for our 10 year old daughter’s birthday. When they asked to use her computer I was thankful we use an internet filter and didn’t have to hesitate to let them use it.
Anyone who’s ever surfed the web knows how easy it is to stumble upon inappropriate content. Parents have an obligation to protect their children inside and outside of the home.
Thankfully, there are some great applications parents can turn to for help. My favorite, if you have younger children, is K-9. It’s best for younger children because it’s free and doesn’t have all the options that pay programs do. That being said, K-9 is still an excellent internet filter that we’ve been using and promoting for the past couple years.
With K-9 you have 6 different levels of protection and 60 different categories that you can choose to block or not. You can also limit what times the computer can access the internet. You’ll also be able to view the internet surfing history broken down by categories to see what sites your children are visiting.
Blue Coat recently released a new Beta version that runs on Mac’s as well as Windows, it works in more browsers, and more search engines. I highly recommend K-9 and created a video to help parents install and set-up the program.
For older children I’d recommend Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, or Safe Eyes. They’ll run you $40-50 per year but all of them provide great protection and have more options than K-9. CyberPatrol gives you the most options, Safe Eyes is best if you want to install it on more than one computer, and Net Nanny is the easiest of the three for parents to use. Net Nanny also beat its competitors in reviews by a slight margin.
All three of these programs have different features so I’d recommend that you view each of their websites and purchase the one that best meets your needs.
It should be said that no internet filter is perfect and there are ways around internet filters. It’s a well known fact that kids in schools and libraries use proxy avoidance to get around the filters. If you, as a parent, have any inclination that your child is using their computer inappropriately you have two choices. Either you can put the computer in a public place in the house and/or take it away altogether for a period of time. Don’t worry, it is possible for them to live without it..
If you have children that use the internet in your house, an internet filter is essential. Get one today!
-Bert
October 14th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Too true. There are no perfect filters. There’s also the Covenant Eyes filter. Have you ever tested that before? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I have installed K9 for my brothers kids.
It seems to produce a error through the browser that its not responding , this seems to be intermittent. When i log into the admin area it says its failed to connect to a service point and that its going to try another (i guess this is why its intermittent). I just wondered if this is a common problem with the service?
PS the failed point has same IP every time and is in the bluecoat network according to tracert
December 19th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Hi AndiC. I’ve loaded K9 on dozens of computers and have never run into the problem you’ve described, or any problem for that matter.
I did a quick Google search and didn’t see anything there either. I’d suggest trying K9′s tech support:
http://www1.k9webprotection.com/support/index.php
Best of luck!
-Bert
January 21st, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Have you checked out Livia Web Protection? It’s a pay, managed web filtering service, but where it is different is that it is powered by Websense – the software utilizes the enterprise Websense URL database and filtering technology and brings it to the home user. They offer a 14-day trial at http://www.liviaweb.com if you are interested to test it.