Quote:
Originally Posted by Titan
Any suggestions? I want to let my 8y/o have a bit more freedom to surf, but not that much.
Content Barrier seems to be okay. Any other suggestions or experience with CB?
Thanks.
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It depends on how you want to manage your kid's surfing - if you want to confine them to only a set of sites, just set up the parental controls in System Preferences on a 10.5.x system (Leopard) and restrict them to the sites you want them to be allowed to visit. No need to purchase any software to accomplish this.
If, on the other hand, you want to allow access to the internet at large, minus the crusty bits, consider signing up for OpenDNS, and configuring your Mac (or your router if your kid uses more than one machine) to point to OpenDNS for DNS services. It's free, and its one less app to have to run and maintain on the machine. You can set the filtering to be quite strict, and eliminate the porn/malware/dating/bikini/whatever sites. The block lists are community maintained, and do a pretty good job - good enough that I use it to handle filtering for public access workstations at a couple of clients where machines are open to joe public and not monitored. OpenDNS can also log surfing history, so its useful to review where your kid is going, if they are surfing unsupervised.
Personally, I think the second approach (OpenDNS) is the better of the two - you want your kid to develop the ability to search and quickly identify websites that are useful to them, without artificially constraining them, but not expose them to stuff that's inappropriate. Its such a vital skill, and lets face it, you aren't going to be able to whitelist your kids websites fast enough to keep up with their active exploration of what's out there that interests them, or handle sites that link to other sites (eg. they research dinosaurs - how you gonna whitelist National Geographic, Drumheller, dino blogs, the Calgary Dino's, etc, all at once?)
Lastly, no software is a substitute for supervision - I don't think 8 years old is old enough to be allowed to surf when the computer is at least not in common sight (eg. a family room, den, whatever), but that's just my opinion - you have to use your own judgement on that.
It's an interesting topic, and one that I will be facing in a few years, as my oldest is 5 now.
Parental Control Software for Mac
