BLUE COAT K9 WEB PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Here, it’s possible to provide the administrator password for access to either that site or the entire blocked category for a limited time. At these settings, its blocking performance was good, although it did allow through many of the self-harm websites on our list.Īs with all parental control software, accessing a barred site causes a notification page to load in your browser. Other than this limitation, its web interface makes it easy to configure, and allows you to set the categories of site to block, to schedule web access and enforce safe internet searching, but the defaults are quite sensible. As such it's not particularly well suited to a shared family computer. K9's filtering settings are global, affecting all users of a given PC.

BLUE COAT K9 WEB PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Once installed, the software is administered through a password-protected interface that's available to any user – we'd prefer the extra security of limiting access to computer administrators only. There's no facility to block other programs or limit whole-computer use according to a schedule, and although the Blue Coat website suggests that a future version will include filtering for chat rooms and instant messaging, the features weren't included in the version we tested.Īlthough K9 is free, you still need to register to receive a licence before you can use it, and you need a new licence for each computer you want to protect. It's immediately at something of a disadvantage because, unlike the other two free packages, K9 protects users only against unsuitable web pages. Its impressive web filters helped it win our Budget Buy award, but it now competes with two other free packages: the release version of Online Family and Microsoft's Family Safety. A year ago, Blue Coat's K9 was the only free parental control software other than the beta version of Norton Online Family.

Blue coat k9 web protection