Best Parental Control software?

D

DJ Zaki

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2002
Messages
479
While I tried to read some previous threads, what is the best Parental Control software? I can't think of anything else to go with besides Internet Security 2006 from Norton, I know a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Symantec, but I just need a quick answer, I have to buy something soon for my friend who wants to restrict access to his PC from his 13yrs old daughter. Basically he wants to control what she looks at, log what she surfs, and stop access from a few sites such as MySpace.com
 
Before you get a lot of responses about proxy servers and such, is this a single computer setup?
 
The evil AOL has descent parental controls..

Other than that, I believe norton has them.
 
amazingly just 1 computer, which I guess makes sense since it's just him, his wife, and his daughter...and 1 dog.

I don't think I'm too worried about Corey (his daughter) knowing about proxies or learning about them from friends. My friend and his wife just wants a safe environment for their daughter to use the net, while he can also quickly turn on/off the parental controls for themselves.
 
A seccond vote for aol (most updated, easiest to control)

if they are already on highspeed use something like smoothwall w/dans guardian (that might be tough to turn off though, unless you set it in non-transparent mode, and force the daughter (login account, etc) to go though it, and have a parent accound not go through it
 
Best parental control is to sit there and watch her or say she cant use the computer til they trust her to use it =P...anyway, on a more constructive note, Cyber Patrol?
 
Like the above poster, the best internet monitor is simply an active parent. You wouldn't let a 12 year old girl walk around downtown by herself and walk into all the dirty stores and meet strangers, would you? Same deal with the internet, theres no substitute for supervision. Tell them to put the computer in a public place, like the living room where mom or dad will be around.
 
Look for the American Family Filter. It works well if all they need is a net filter. Not free, though.
 
nick_sabatino said:
Like the above poster, the best internet monitor is simply an active parent. You wouldn't let a 12 year old girl walk around downtown by herself and walk into all the dirty stores and meet strangers, would you? Same deal with the internet, theres no substitute for supervision. Tell them to put the computer in a public place, like the living room where mom or dad will be around.
Click to expand...

Teenagers see right through that stuff, they have to put up with it at school, and know all the ways to hide stuff (alt tab, etc) quickly, and if the parents aren't computer savy, they will have no clue either. But I will agree, trust your kids, educate them on whats good/bad, even if it's you or someone else "in the know" telling them, not their parents

edit: lets not let this thread (like every other one on this subject) turn into an argument on parenting. They want a soloution to block, not how to raise their kids
 
Trust..... but verify....

I've used cybersitter for years. Nice thing about it is that unlike norton, cyber patrol, net nanny, bess - is that its a one time fee, no subscription required.

I have my account and my wife's account set up with "do not filter" and the kids have all the accesses I want filtered, filtered.

The only hiccup occurs when you switch user instead of log off/log on. When that happens, it gets confused and filters everybody, requiring a restart to clean it up.

If you all use one account - it has a "suspend filter" button (password accessed, of course) that lets you suspend the filtering for a specified time period, after which it turns back on automatically.

Home setup: 6 PCs, 2 "shared" in the family room and 1 each for 3 out of 4 of my kids and 1 for the wife. Cybersitter is on the shared systems, the systems in the kids rooms do not have inet access (blocked by my dlink router) and my wife's PC is unfiltered.

Shared PCs have all 6 accounts available.

BB
 
The Parental Controls ons the newer Linksys wireless routers work pretty well.. It's like $20 for 2 years too.
 
I second American Family Filter. I had to work on a church machine with it installed and I could not disable it at all without the password. The filtering was very good and had plenty of customization. It would have been easy to disable and reenable if they'd remembered to give me the password. If you tamper with the software it actually locks the internet connection down. Just make damn sure you remember the password.

The ironic thing was their internet connection had quite working because someone had tampered with the software and it had locked the TCP/IP stack so they had to pay me $50/hr to fix it. (Yeah, it wasn't my church so I didn't donate work I just only charged them for an hour even though I spent probably 3 on it before I tracked down the problem.)
 
Im using a Zyxel HS-100 wireless router with built in parental controls. It protects the main computer and all other PCs in the house. I would recommend router based setup as opposed to software the kids can bypass.
 
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