Refined for 2010, the Security Starter Kit will ensure that your sanity lasts way longer than your resolutions through a collection of must-have programs to protect your Windows computer.
In our six categories this year, we offer the core essentials of Antivirus and Anti-spyware, as well as ancillary but important categories such as In-browser Security, Firewall, Encryption, and Parental Control. If you're looking for more than security, there's also our Windows Starter Kit. Essential utilities have earned their own kit, too: the Windows Utilities Starter Kit.
Parental control
KidZui
- CNET editors' rating: 5.0 stars
KidZui seems like a kiddified browser with social networking rolled in. Children can find their favorite YouTube videos, rate content using tags, and share opinions with other KidZui friends, all from a colorful interface with big buttons and labels. KidZui is anything but a standard kids' browser, though, and what makes it so unique is precisely why it's such a safe tool for children.
KidZui is a closed system, not filter-driven, so all content that's available has been approved by editors into a whitelist database. Kids can explore the Internet by using the search/URI bar, or search by a left-nav sidebar that's organized by topics including science, movies and TV, games, sports, and animals. Parental registration is required before your child can create an online identity, and there's a paid upgrade available to provide more options for both kids and their parents. A KidZui extension for Firefox turns Mozilla's browser into a KidZui experience, too.
Norton Safety Minder
Norton Safety Minder is the desktop component of OnlineFamily.Norton, a comprehensive system from Symantec designed to do more than merely monitor and block content that parents want to prevent their children from seeing. Depending on the parents' initiative, it can be used to help foster discussion about content. It's definitely not a "set-it-and-forget-it" tool.
There's a wide range of control over what sites a child can access. The restrictions can vary from a strict no-access policy that can block specific sites and site categories, to a more lenient notification e-mail sent to the parents when the child visits sites that parents merely want to be warned about. On the child's side, kids are given the option of e-mailing their parents when they're blocked--if the parents allow those e-mails in the first place. While this might not be for every parent, anything that discourages parents and kids from treating Internet access like a TV channel flipper is a good thing.
K9 Web Protection
- CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars
K9 Web Protection provides many options for customizing your remote Web supervision needs, but also comes with a handful of predesigned filters. With more than 50 categories for organizing Web sites, and a keyword-free rating system, the Web monitoring and blocking aspects of the software functioned well. Equally impressive, and a little bit scary, was the log that detailed not just blocked Web sites but also every Web site visited.
Installation and removal isn't easy: be prepared for a multistep process. K9 does lack a chatware filter, leaving some holes for predation.
