Like every father, I’ve been worried about having the kid surfing the interwebs. There are a lot of sites out there that shouldn’t be viewed by children, not to mention any malware that may be lurking around. For a while I have been using a combination of Mac OSX’s parental controls and a plug-in for Firefox called Foxfilter to manage what content she’s able to visit. I’m still using the parental controls but I’ve stopped using Foxfilter for something that is a lot more centralized and feature rich, Kerio Control. (Disclaimer: I work for Kerio, and I’m in sales – you’ve been warned)
Although Kerio Control is mainly for the SMB market, it can make for a really nice firewall for a family too. The set up was very easy as was the configuration. The whole thing took about 45 from putting the CD in the drive to having it ready to go. What I really like about Control is the granularity that you have with granting access to sites. You can select sites with Kerio Web Filter and you can manually add sites to block, with the latter also being able to be done at the user level.You are also able to white list sites as well and again this can be done either globally or on the user level.
Where Control really shines is the reporting capabilities. You are able to see exactly what is being done over the web and by which user and in an easy to understand graphical format. Here is an example where you can see who is visiting a specific site:
Pretty cool, huh? There is even more that you can do with the reporting but I won’t bore you with the details.
Anyway, if you have a small or medium and want to keep you computers safe, I think you need to give a look at Kerio Control.
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