Last year we mentioned Microsoft’s Steady State and how it’s simple imaging and rollback capabilities made it easy to protect your computer from your children, “Guest” users and elderly people. Today we will be highlighting another easy to use program that makes it easy to protect your computer and its users when on the internet.
K9 Web Protection from Blue Coat makes it easy to filter and restrict what websites can be viewed on the internet. It’s great for keep kids from stumbling on to naughty sites, for keeping web novices off of mal-ware filled site and for keeping employees from shopping, gambling, and from visiting Facebook or Myspace when they should be working. More features are explained below.
To get K9 Web Protection, go to the K9 website via the link at the bottom of the page, click the Download K9 Today For Free button on the left of the page. After getting a free license, you will be emailed the link to the program download. Once the program is downloaded, install it. You will be asked for the license key and to setup an administrator password. Remember this password because it is needed to update/uninstall the program, as well as changing its filter settings. After the installation you will have to restart your computer so the K9Filter can be activated.
After your computer is restarted you can start setting the web filter by clicking on the Blue Coat K9 Web Protection Admin button in the start menu. This will take you to the admin login page which will ask you for your admin password which you set up during the installation. Once logged in you can set up filters, manage time restriction, enforcing Safesearch on search engines, blocked keywords and more!
The first settings panel lets you chose which types of sites to block. You can block common things like porn, malware, drug and nudity. You can also block stuff like email, blogs, software downloads and shopping sites and even advertising! .
The Time Restrictions panel lets you set when you want users to have internet access. You can chose from unrestricted access; Nightguard, which lets you set when the internet turns off at night and comes back on in the morning; and custom which lets you pick what hours to to allow and deny internet access.
The Web Site Exceptions panel lets you chose which sites to allow or block by URL in addition to the filters setup in the Filters panel.
The Blocking Effects panel lets you set what happens when a blocked site is reached. If you Show Admin Options, you will have the option to temporarily or permanently allow a site after supplying your admin password. If you enable the time out option, when you can choose to deny web access for so many minutes if so many blocked pages are accesses with so many minutes.
The URL Keywords panel lets you create a list of key words to block in addition to the main filtering rules in the first panel.
The Advanced panel has the option to force Safe Search on search engines that support it like Google, AOL, Live, and Yahoo!. There is also the option to filter HTTPS traffic.
Whether for home, school, business, or library, K9 Web Protection is a great choice for free, advanced web filtering.
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