Neil Rubenking from PC Magazine took a look at CyberParol 7.7 and published his review a few days ago: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2334004,00.asp. CyberPatrol ranked a 4 out of 5.
Other Notable PC Magazine Reviews of Parental Controls:
Safe Eyes 5.0 4/5 Editor’s Choice
NetNanny 5.6 4/5 Editor’s Choice
Webroot Parental Controls 3.5/5
October, 20, 2008 Crisp Thinking announced the availability of IMSaferPlus. Available for both PC and Mac, IMSaferPlus sells for $23.95 per year. However, their website currently lists a “Lifetime” membership for $32.95.
IMSafer monitors Instant Messaging for inappropriate content and reports on information posted on Social Networking profiles.
The plus version includes instant alerts of suspicious IM conversations, a “Reputation Network” to flag dangerous web users, and a deeper level of social network monitoring than the free version of IMSafer.
A couple months back a customer asked me over lunch “Why can’t you just block the bad videos on YouTube?” I started into a technical explanation of how difficult filtering video streams is. Part way through the answer an idea sprang to life. I could barely wait to get back to the office and pound out a proof of concept.
I’m excited to be able to announce an enhancement to our Safe Eyes parental control software which provides clip-by-clip filtering on YouTube.
Traditionally most Internet filters have either blocked or allowed YouTube as a whole. Most often it was blocked. The new filtering capability in Safe Eyes represents the first time an Internet filter has been able to allow or block individual YouTube clips based on their content no matter where they appear online.
YouTube is the third most heavily trafficked website in the world and the fourth in the U.S., after Google, Yahoo and MySpace. Blocking the whole site is unnecessary for families because it means blocking good content along with bad, including perfectly innocent videos making the rounds among friends. Safe Eyes’ new ability to filter out only the offensive clips solves the problem.
- Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com
The new YouTube filtering is included in the latest version of Safe Eyes and available now at www.safeeyes.com. Thanks to the entire Safe Eyes team for turning this “lunch table idea” into a reality.
Press Release: Keep YouTube ‘Clean’ for Your Kids with Safe Eyes
On Monday, September 22nd 2008, McAfee and Secure Computing announced they had signed a definitive merger agreement. While the deal still needs to obtain the blessing of Secure Computing’s stockholders, it is anticipated that it won’t be a problem.
Secure computing has over 22,000 customers in 160 countries and is the number 1 player in the web security appliance market and the number 2 player in the message security appliance market. The combination will create one of the largest security companies in the world.
The all cash deal is estimated at about $465 Million and expected to close around the end of Q408. Through significant cost and revenue synergy, McAfee expects to break even on the investment in 2009, with full cost synergies being realized through 2010 and 2011.
CyberPatrol today announced a new business-level filtering product called SiteSURV (Press Release).
The product uses a DNS poisoning technique to accomplish the filtering by checking DNS lookups against CyberPatrol’s site database. While this type of filtering is easy to deploy by simply changing your DNS settings, it is also among the easiest to bypass (I won’t go into details on how).
They have two versions currently: the standard version and a self hosted version for larger organizations (SiteSURV Plus). The plus version seems to have more customization capability than the standard version, such as choosing your categories, and creating your own list of allowed/blocked sites. However, with the plus version you also will need to furnish your own windows based server to run the software on.
The NetNanny for Mac website is now online at http://www.netnanny.com/mac. It appears that the new product is a branded version of Intego’s ContentBarrier X4 product. If you compare the screen shots from here: http://www.netnanny.com/mac/features and http://www.intego.com/contentbarrier/ you will find them pretty much the same with NetNanny branding instead of Intego branding.
ContentWatch, the developer of NetNanny, announced the release of NetNanny for Mac.
From the release it appears the product will contain:
The new Mac version of NetNanny will be available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese for $39.99 for one computer and $20 for each additional computer.
More information is supposed to be availabe online at: www.netnanny.com/mac However, the link was not working at the time of this posting.
On July 21st San Diego based Total Tech launched a new Internet filtering service call Livia Web Protection. The solution is powered by Websense filtering technology.
Livia seems to have the basics of web blocking and reporting capabilities, but lacks many other features you will find in most parental controls software such as time controls, IM blocking & monitoring, or privacy features. Maybe these things are yet to come.
The price of Livia is higher than most parental control software at $4.95 per month for 1 computer and $2.95 a month for additional computers. That works out to $59.40/year for 1 computer, 94.80/year for 2 computers, or $130.20/year for 3 computers. While an award-winning solution like Safe Eyes is only $49.95/year for up to 3 computers. Livia seems pretty pricey out of the gate.
I’m unable to find system requirements on thier site, but I would assume this service is for Windows PC’s only.
Aaron Kenny
As the CTO of InternetSafety.com I have led the design and development of ISP, Consumer, and Business level Internet filtering products. More About Me
