K9 Web Protection & Balance

For our fireside my focus is "balance." There are many directions to take this, but I think I'm going to talk a little bit about how to control digital media in the home. I plan on talking about time spent using digital media, but I also want to discuss programs that we can use to help us balance.

One thing I decided to look into was filters that can be used and I came across K9 Web Protection. It has a great list of features. Here's the list from the website:

• Web site blocking by category, including pornography, illegal drugs, personals/dating, violence/hate/racism
• Easy pre-set levels to choose from depending on the age of your children
• SafeSearch enabled on all search engines to show cleaner search results
• Time restrictions, including NightGuard(tm), to disallow internet access during designated times
• Custom “always allow” and “always block” lists for your personal preferences
• Ability to override a block with the parent password
• Tamper resistant for more savvy kids
• Reports showing activity to categories of web sites
• Real-time categorization of new web sites
• Compatible with Windows or Mac machines

As far as the features go, it seems to work pretty well. The biggest perk (to me at least) is that it's free and it does a good job.

I did find the settings to be a bit clunky. For example, I've tried resetting the password multiple times and I haven't been able to create one that I want. Instead, I have used the temporary password that they emailed me. 

For their levels of protection they do have pre-set levels to choose from, but I wanted something in-between their settings and didn't see an easy way to customize it.

Also, the reports showing activity on the computer is also a little hard to understand.

In spite of these criticisms I do think this is a good product if you are in the market for one, it just may take time to learn how to use it.