Rhinosoft AllegroSurf 5.1
AllegroSurf is the Swiss army knife of filtering products; aside from its filtering functions it offers a variety of other uses, from pop-up blocking, advanced caching facilities and Net connection sharing. Those are all fine product uses, and do help to add to the value of the product, which ultimately came out with disappointing results in our filtering tests.
AllegroSurf's install is easy to sit through, and with a downloadable 2.8MB executable shouldn't be too much stress on anyone's system. We were mildly annoyed with the fact that at the end of the installation it touts other RhinoSoft products, but at least that's a screen you can quickly skip out of.
AllegroSurf uses black and whitelists for filtering, although when you first install the software these are blank; that gives you a lot of scope to work with, but at the same time also means that you'll have a hefty amount of work in front of you. It also offers a metafiltering option across six categories: Sex, Drugs, Hate Speech, Crime, Extreme, Sports, and that's what we tested with.
Without activating a black/whitelist, AllegroSurf was clearly the weakest filtering product in our roundup. It let through three different objectionable pornographic sites, blocked an odd assortment of sites dealing with sexual education matters, and only partially blocked some of the hate sites in our test list. While it doesn't specifically state what its metafilter uses, we'd offer a guess that it's a simple word filter, albeit one that works only sporadically. Strangely enough, for a filtering package of this type, it managed to pass our filtering parody page, something that was beyond most of the other packages in our roundup.
Because of its initially blank white/black list, there's no way to submit sites to a central server for review, which means (like products such as Childsafe) that you'll have to build your own filtering list to make AllegroSurf truly worthwhile, at least from a filtering perspective. On the plus side, when its metafilter did filter sites, it did so quickly and efficiently. It uses a popup message to indicate that a site is unsuitable, so users should quickly become aware what areas are allowed and what areas aren't.
To be fair to AllegroSurf, content filtering is only part of the overall package on offer, but sadly within at least its filtering capabilities it's remarkably weak.
AllegroSurf 5.1
Company: RhinoSoft
Price: US$49.95 via download
| Introduction | Editor's Choice | How we tested | |
| AllegroSurf | ChildSafe | ChildWebGuardian | ControlKids |
| CyberPatrol | Cybersitter | Net Nanny | WeBlocker |
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