NetNanny… kinda fucked (and likely would filter this blog)
I have two daughters – one a teenager – so protecting them from Internet predators and other Internet nasties is a real concern. I’m tech savvy and have done things like blocking some sites (like www.myspace.com – or the red light district of the Internet in my opionion) right at the router. Well, my tech savvy older daughter got around that by latching on to a neighbor’s insecure hotspot (not to do anything really bad but to read MySpace pages on her favorite bands). Parental controls is a landscape, I’ve found, littered with fancy promises and lousy delivery.
So I tried a trial of NetNanny (glad I didn’t pay) to perform web filtering and IM traffic capture. At least in my experience with NetNanny the software was a nuisance to truly configure and filled my inbox with bogus alerts. With the web filter turned on my daughter couldn’t get to legit websites like www.cnn.com sometimes because, in one example, an article on the dangers of smoking contained the word cigarette!
The feature I most wanted – IM message capture – never seemed to work… and the thought of tracking down NetNanny tech support to try and fix the problem… well, we all know what tech support is like.
So now I’m trying out Microsoft’s Windows Live Family Safety option (free) that can be bolted on to Windows 7. I already tossed out our existing AV/AS for Microsoft Security Essentials (free, small download).
You are likely thinking – hey – why are you replacing NetNanny’s fucked software with Microsoft’s likely fucked software? The answer is easy – I need more material for this blog…
