Qustodio

Custodio means watch over or guard in Latin. Ancient Roman parents surely guarded their precious children from slave uprisings, volcanoes, and other dangers of the day. Qustodio (free, direct) extends protection into the decidedly non-Roman realm of the Internet. It's not as feature-rich as some parental control tools, but it has some unusual abilities, and it's free.

Getting Started
Like Norton Online Family Premier ($49.99 direct, 4 stars), Qustodio keeps all of its configuration and monitoring activity online, with a small client program that enforces the rules installed on each protected computer. To start using the product you first define a free online account.

During installation, you specify the number of child accounts to create (up to eight) and name the children. For each child you indicate the gender and birthdate and also select from a small set of avatar icons. You also name the computer and match each child account with the corresponding Windows account on this computer.

That last step is important, because Qustodio works across all your computers. After the initial installation, to install on another computer you just give it a name and match the kids to their user accounts.

Online Dashboard
You can log in to the Qustodio portal From any Internet-capable computer. Here you can add or remove children or modify profile settings. You can also change the names of your computers, or hide Qustodio's tray icon. Another tab enables daily or weekly email summary reports. Those are the overall account settings. Most parents probably spend more time configuring the product's protection settings for each child.

Qustodio can block access to Web sites matching 29 categories, but unlike most parental control products it doesn't use a database of known websites. Instead, it analyzes each page and categorizes it on the spot. That means that it can block a brand new porn page the minute it appears. Net Nanny 6.5 ($39.99 direct, 4.5 stars), Bsecure Online v6.16 ($49.95 direct for three licenses, 4.5 stars), and AVG Family Safety ($19.95 direct for three licenses, 4.5 stars) use real-time analysis too, but only on sites not already categorized.

The categories seem to be arranged roughly in order from safest to most dangerous. Pornography, gambling, violence, and such?all blocked by default?appear at the end. Educational, news, entertainment, health, and other safe categories appear at the beginning of the list. In between are categories like social networking, file sharing, and chat, categories that some parents might want to block. Parents also have the option to set any category for monitoring. In this mode Qustodio simply sends an email alert when the child visits a site matching the category.

Many parental control systems offer to block uncategorized sites. For those relying on a database of known sites, an uncategorized site is simply one they haven't gotten around to analyzing. Blocking uncategorized sites would effectively block all brand-new sites. A site not categorized by Qustodio, on the other hand, is typically one that doesn't have enough text for analysis. Chances are good such a site is actively avoiding categorization, so I'd advise turning on the option to block uncategorized sites.

One way to keep kids away from naughty websites is to make finding them difficult. Qustodio can force Safe Search in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, automatically stripping out inappropriate search terms and search results.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/IA0r0MbI3Zs/0,2817,2397041,00.asp

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