ProxyMIS ControlKids 5.02
If the name itself didn't clue you in, the cloyingly sweet picture of a small girl with her thumb held triumphant on ControlKids' Web site should make it entirely clear that this is a package aimed squarely at the concerned parent market.
Like many of the packages we've tested, ControlKids offers an evaluation period with its package. ControlKids, however, has a unique twist; its evaluation period is a random number of days, between 7 and 14; we're not entirely sure what useful purpose this serves.
ControlKids boasts a clean and easy to use interface, complete with cutesy icons for each of the program's function areas -- Forbidden Sites, Popups, Confidential Information, Clear Activity, Downloading, Keyboard Capture, A help file and the program's main menu. In an odd piece of GUI design, the same tabs that appear on the left hand side of the interface are duplicated exactly across the top of it as well.
ControlKids does boast some features that no other package in our roundup could match, most notably the ability to keylog every character entered on the host PC. This is a common technique used by hackers, and it's a little unusual to see it in a commercial product. It does open up the possibility for small businesses to use it to log employee activity, although how appreciative said employees would be to have an application called 'ControlKids' running on their desktops is hard to say.
ControlKids' main interface can be locked with the usual password method, although in the version we tested, by default it isn't, which is unusual. Like ChildWebGuardian, although it offers a site black/whitelist facility, it works primarily by filtering content based across five categories -- Sexually explicit, Violence/Intolerance/Weapons, Sects/Cults, Casino Games and Hacking/Warez/Cracks. There's no capability to view the filtering mechanism, which in our testing seemed to be word-based, or indeed to add any modifiers or additional terms to it. You can add or remove sites to the white and black lists, which work in concert with the inbuilt content filter, although by default these start off blank when the software is first installed. On the subject of all things blank, ControlKids does log internet activity, but offers no clues as to whether a site was passed or blocked, leaving that area of research up to the end-user.
ControlKids is also lacking in facilities to set up multiple users, so whatever settings you enter are those that will have to be used by every user of that machine. While there are some consumers who won't need a multi-user function, it would make a handy addition.
In our testing, ControlKids' results were middling to poor. The one area where it did shine in relation to other packages was its pop-up killer, which worked exactly as advertised. Sadly, that's pretty much outside the scope of this review, and simpler pop-up killers are available for free. When ControlKids finds an objectionable site, it pops up a standard graphic telling the user that the site is blocked, which is better than showing nothing, but combined with the lacklustre logs, end users will have to do a lot of digging around to ascertain if sites are in fact objectionable or not.
ControlKids blocked most of our pornographic sites, although it did allow us into one particularly objectionable archive of deliberately disgusting images. Its filter proved sketchy for sites containing potentially sexual terms, as it blocked the Sydney Mardi Gras website and the AIDS quilt. Likewise with hate sites, it passed some white power sites while blocking some pro-tolerance ones, and in our general testing it blocked our filtering parody page which contained no genuinely objectionable content.
At US$35, ControlKids could offer an awful lot more than simple and often incorrect content filtering, something that a package like We-Blocker does for free. As it doesn't, there's really no reason to go with this particular filtering package, unless the cutesy graphics appeal to you for some strange reason.
Proxymis ControlKids
Company: Proxymis Multimedia
Price: US$35 via download
| Introduction | Editor's Choice | How we tested | |
| AllegroSurf | ChildSafe | ChildWebGuardian | ControlKids |
| CyberPatrol | Cybersitter | Net Nanny | WeBlocker |
7%
3%
