Free parental control tools
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Parental control is the name we tipically use for the act of filtering kids interaction with several Internet sources of data. The same action in the business world is called content filtering.
Both names involves the censorship concept while trying to defend certain interests.
I already briefly covered content filtering considering Google release of such tool sooner or later.
I don't have kids but several times found myself wondering if IT offers free products to help millions of parents who decided to protect children in this way.
I don't want to judge approach in this blog (but if you care to know I quietly admit I would use such tools for my children) but technical solutions.
After significant search I learned there are very few and poor alternatives.
I evaluate the biggest issue in this case is complexity of solution since a parental control software can be used by individuals of any level of technical knowledge. The second issue is the size of categorizing database, decreeing efficacy of the tool, at least for the URL filtering part.
Given these two criteria what I found available for free seems very poor:
DansGuardian
Considered the best in its category it's an open source project working on most Linux distributions.
DansGuardian is distributed as standard installation package and there is no liveCD format, which misses the very first criteria I listed above.
The good news is it supports the free URLblacklist.com categorizing database.
CensorNet
This seems a very good alternative to DansGuardian, still based on Linux but relatively easier to install since it formats a dedicated machine and install the whole operating system.
But while you can manually setup which sites are blocked (which is almost impossible to make the tool effective) for free, you have to pay if you want access to an already populated categorizing database.
Naomi
A very interesting italian alternative for Windows able to block undesirable sites not with categorizing database but with euristic filters.
Unlikely the project has been just declared dead since the developer has no more spare time.
K9 Web Protection
For Windows. This one is the free version of a business-grade content filtering tool, claiming to have the largest and most accurate categorizing database.
We-Blocker
For Windows. It relies on a categorizing database where We-Blocker community submit new sites and toold developers audit requests before populating database.
The company survive charging on-demand support, which seems to work since the product is there since 1999.
As I said a very poor horizon and sincerely I'm very surprised seeing community dedicated so few attentions to this problem.
Luckily a new big player is arriving: Microsoft announced the upcoming Windows Live Family Safety (another reason why Google could do the same move). If you are interested you better add yourself to the waiting list.
If you don't have time to wait for Microsoft and you still have to address above solutions complexity probably virtualization can help.
The recent VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge produced several ready-to-run virtual machines with preloaded content filtering tools:
None of them are near requirements of semplicity and completeness I think should be reached but are alternatives to contemplate while waiting for a better product.
Both names involves the censorship concept while trying to defend certain interests.
I already briefly covered content filtering considering Google release of such tool sooner or later.
I don't have kids but several times found myself wondering if IT offers free products to help millions of parents who decided to protect children in this way.
I don't want to judge approach in this blog (but if you care to know I quietly admit I would use such tools for my children) but technical solutions.
After significant search I learned there are very few and poor alternatives.
I evaluate the biggest issue in this case is complexity of solution since a parental control software can be used by individuals of any level of technical knowledge. The second issue is the size of categorizing database, decreeing efficacy of the tool, at least for the URL filtering part.
Given these two criteria what I found available for free seems very poor:
DansGuardian
Considered the best in its category it's an open source project working on most Linux distributions.
DansGuardian is distributed as standard installation package and there is no liveCD format, which misses the very first criteria I listed above.
The good news is it supports the free URLblacklist.com categorizing database.
CensorNet
This seems a very good alternative to DansGuardian, still based on Linux but relatively easier to install since it formats a dedicated machine and install the whole operating system.
But while you can manually setup which sites are blocked (which is almost impossible to make the tool effective) for free, you have to pay if you want access to an already populated categorizing database.
Naomi
A very interesting italian alternative for Windows able to block undesirable sites not with categorizing database but with euristic filters.
Unlikely the project has been just declared dead since the developer has no more spare time.
K9 Web Protection
For Windows. This one is the free version of a business-grade content filtering tool, claiming to have the largest and most accurate categorizing database.
We-Blocker
For Windows. It relies on a categorizing database where We-Blocker community submit new sites and toold developers audit requests before populating database.
The company survive charging on-demand support, which seems to work since the product is there since 1999.
As I said a very poor horizon and sincerely I'm very surprised seeing community dedicated so few attentions to this problem.
Luckily a new big player is arriving: Microsoft announced the upcoming Windows Live Family Safety (another reason why Google could do the same move). If you are interested you better add yourself to the waiting list.
If you don't have time to wait for Microsoft and you still have to address above solutions complexity probably virtualization can help.
The recent VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge produced several ready-to-run virtual machines with preloaded content filtering tools:
None of them are near requirements of semplicity and completeness I think should be reached but are alternatives to contemplate while waiting for a better product.
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