About two months ago I posted on the new resources available for parents as a part of Microsoft Live. Today I stumbled upon Blue Coat® K9 Web Protection. This is a content filtering solution for your home computer. K9 helps provide a family-safe internet experience, where you control the internet content that enters your home. K9 Web Protection is available for Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista computer and currently used in 906,683 homes (according to their website). For more information on the K9 features;
Content Filtering by Category
Time Restrictions
K9 Web Protection enables you to restrict the time of day users can access Web sites. If there are specific times when you do and do not want your family accessing the Web, this feature assists you in enforcing that policy.
Web Site Exceptions
In addition to the defined and custom protection levels, K9 Web Protection allows you to explicitly block or allow access to specific Web sites. For example, K9 is blocking a site, but you want to allow access to it, but not any others in the category.
Blocking Effects
K9 Web Protection offers an audible feature in which the application plays a bark when a user attempts to access a blocked site. This feature is useful to alert a parent, teacher, or other care provider that someone under his or her supervision might be stumbling onto offensive or inappropriate content.
K9 also enables Time Out Settings. If a user attempts to visit too many blocked sites in a specified period of time, K9 completely blocks access to the Web for a specified time.
URL Keywords
K9 Web Protection allows you to block access to Web pages based on keywords in the Web page URL. You can, for example, block any Web page that has the word sex in the URL.
Web Search Options
K9 Web Protection offers the option of enforcing the use of Google SafeSearch, which diminishes the amount of adult material that might be returned as a result of an Internet search. This feature is enabled by default. Currently, K9 Web Protection supports the safe search functionality of the Google Search Engine only.
View Reports of Internet Activity
K9 Web Protection allows you to view reports of all Internet browsing activity and administrative actions