K9 Web Protection: Protecting your kids eyes on the net

A common question I get from moms is “How do I filter out some sites from the internet so my kids can’t see them?“ (Honestly, I’ve never had a father ask me that, wonder why? Think about it and get back to me.)

My first response is always the same. Ultimately you can’t keep someone who wants to see something from seeing it. Teenagers are very savvy about disabling filters and if they want to look at something when you aren’t around the filter isn’t going to do much for a child beyond 11-12 years old.

What a filter can do is keep someone from stumbling on a porn site. And that’s what we want to keep our kids from doing.

So, this is K9 Web Protection is worth checking out. It’s free and it’s based on some very powerful stuff.  Here are some quick facts:  (quick  summary:  it’s good and it’s free)

K9 Web Protection is different from other solutions for the home in several important respects:

• Service-based filtering – Blue Coat’s filtering database operates as a service. It receives and rates over 50 million requests every day, making it the most accurate content filtering database available. This accuracy is important in protecting your family, given the Internet’s rapid changes and growth. Plus, there is no database to download. K9 Web Protection won’t clog your Internet connection, get “stale” or out of date, or slow down your computer like other products do.
• Dynamic Real-Time Rating™ (DRTR) – Blue Coat’s patent-pending DRTR technology is a very powerful element in our solution, and is vastly different from the old-fashioned “key word filtering” that is so frustrating to users. Using a method of statistical analysis and artificial intelligence to rate new or previously unrated Web pages, DRTR can determine the category of a URL on the fly, without human intervention. However, DRTR only renders a rating when it is confident that it has reached an accurate conclusion.

  We’ve focused DRTR on recognizing the kinds of categories most likely to be blocked. In particular, DRTR is highly accurate in blocking pornography and other “adult content” sites. This focus for DRTR is particularly important because these kinds of sites are constantly – daily and even hourly – popping up on the Internet, and no static database can keep up.

• Automatic updating – Automatic updates of the K9 Web Protection application ensure that you are always protected by the latest features. For example, in Spring of 2005, we added two new categories to our solution: Spyware/Malware Sources, and Spyware Effects/Privacy Concerns. By electing to block sites in these categories, your computer’s rate of infection by unwanted software can be reduced dramatically. We have a variety of new features planned, and your K9 installation will automatically receive updates that include them.
• Efficient caching – K9 Web Protection is a product from Blue Coat. Blue Coat is recognized world-wide as expert in high-performance caching and secure proxy technology. We take advantage of that expertise in K9, so your Internet experience is as fast, reliable, and safe as we can make it.

Unlike other filtering solutions, K9 Web Protection ensures the highest level of protection by building the most relevant ratings database available. Its effective coverage reaches more than one billion Web pages. With K9 Web Protection, you finally have a chance to build a family-safe Internet experience for your home, simply and easily.