If you have teens and a computer then you’ve undoubtedly dealt with porn. Or perhaps you just “deal with porn”, but aren’t to successful. In either event you should try out a program called K9 Web Protection. It is a free content filter for your home (and office if you do it right) computer(s) made by a company called Blue Coat which specializes in “making the internet safe” for medium to large corporations.

The technology

Blue Coat employs a url filtering technology in both it’s commercial and free (K9 Web Protection) software that it acquired in 2004 with the purchase of Cerberian Inc out of Draper Utah. In a nutshell when installed on your computer it runs as a service in the background for all web browsers. When you request a web page the request is sent to the web host and then filtered through a proxy server run by Blue Coat. Depending on the rating of the page and how strict you’ve set up the K9 service on your computer you’ll either see the page you requested or be given an error page like the one pictured below.

As you can see from the picture there’s a drop down menu that will allow you to override the blocking. It allows for:

• Allow all pages on “domainname.com”
• Allow all content rated as “blah”
• Allow all categories

The allow all categories option can only be set for 15 minutes. The others can be permanent or 15 minutes. In order to override the block you’ll of course need to remember your password which is the same one you use when you install the program on your computer.

As far as load on your system goes if you have anything built within the last 4 years you’ll hardly notice it at all. That’s because unlike so many other services which do the same thing everything is run from your computer instead of the majority of the work being off loaded to a remote site.

Setting it up

K9 works fairly well straight out of box, but spending a little extra time to customize it isn’t a bad idea in most cases. When you first login (by clicking the yellow/gold shield icon) you’ll be taken to a page with three options.

• View internet activity – A log of internet activity recorded since K9 was installed
• Setup – Configuration settings
• Get Help – Help files and documentation. Web based

Select “setup”. You’ll notice you are immediately asked for your password. Enter it and proceed to customize to your hearts content. I’m not going to go over each and every configuration option, but needless to say there are many. For example you can lock down all web surfing during certain hours (under Time Restrictions), or if someone tries accessing a blocked category multiple times you can block all web surfing for a specific amount of time (under Blocking Effects)

Another option is blocking url keywords. For most people this would be a little overboard as it is a little overreaching in effect. For example on the site they say putting “sex” in would block both www.sex.com, and www.essex.com which could potentially cause some issues. But if you want it’s there. Just remember it blocks url keywords (the website address) but NOT pages that display those words in the content.

Once you have all the settings applied the way you like them start surfing the internet. If you come across pages you don’t want blocked remove them using the “Allow all pages on ‘domainname.com’” option from the drop-down menu. On the other hand if you see something that should be blocked you can add the site to “website exceptions” under the “always block” category.

If the site blocked is in the wrong categoy you can submit a request to have it reviewed. You’ll find this option on the same page as you see the options for temporarily or permanently removing the block from that page.

Issues to consider

It should go without saying, but don’t forget/lose your password. You can recover it via email if needed but if you change emails like I did it can take a long time to get your password reset. It took me over 6 weeks when I closed down the email account and changed my password. Two days later I couldn’t get in to change the settings and I couldn’t get in to the email to recover the password. Just a word of warning.

Installing this software does not make you popular. After several days of searching all over the place for some way to get past this security feature I could find none. A person could use a proxy server and get around it, but I highly doubt most people would have the time, knowledge, or patience to mess with a proxy setup just to circumvent this little gem. Beyond that you can block “Proxy avoidance” sites.

Stopping the service via the task manager (or any other method for that matter) will not allow you to access restricted sites. In fact if you stop the service you won’t be able to access any websites. If you (or your kid) does disable it you can restart it via services.msc under Blue Coat K9 Web Protection, rebooting your computer, or starting it via the command line using net start webfilter. You will NOT need a password to restart the service, but you’ll need the service running to access the internet.

K9 keeps a handy dandy little log of all internet activity since it was installed. Not just the bad activity, but all of it. You can see the log under “View Internet Activity”. You might want to occasionally clean the log file out.

There you have it, K9 Web Protection which is one of the most reliable, and robust online content filtering systems I have come across. And to top that off it is FREE!