Best free parental controls
The best free parental filter: part 2
In issue #130 I gave a very positive review of the free parental filter K9 Web Protection by Blue Coat Systems [1]. It's definitely the best free filter I've tried but it has one downside; in order to provide the filtering it uses Blue Coat's web servers which can slow down your browsing a tad. Subscriber Adi Iana wrote in tell me about another free parental filter called Naomi [2] that has the advantage of filtering locally. I tried it out and it's quite impressive. 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. I tried the obvious tricks of 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. Freeware, Windows ME and later, 1.3MB
[1] http://www.k9webprotection.com/
[2] http://www.radiance.m6.net/