Any recommendations for decent (free?) software designed to keep kids away from stuff they shouldn’t see on the internet?

Using IE7 at the moment, is the “Content Advisor” up to the job?

Also have McAfee for virus scanning etc, they advertise a £30 “Family protection” add-on which seems a bit steep…

(Target age is 7, only really interested in “Club Penguin” so far, and the odd movie trailer…)

tbh, for a 7 year old I’d just set up a few desktop shoirtcuts that open IE on the site they’re interested in and tell them just to click those.

No chance of mistypes redirecting them to a less savoury site.

Most ‘kids’ sites don’t contain links to stuff that’s elsewhere anyway.

For older kids you have to use the ‘enlightened self interest’ and make them understand that they can go where they want but must understand what’s appropriate and that any dodgy browsing will result in restrictions.

We use firefox here, our oldest is 7 too.

It has a plugin called KidZui, which controls content well for a 7 year old, its also a kids user friendly platform to use.

So she can safely search Horrid History & Hannah Montanna 😉

link here VR:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9689/

Keen to encourage her to use the PC (which is in our living room, not hidden away) but she won’t be using chatrooms or anything. Shortcuts might work, but she likes to look stuff up for school via google and print out pictures.

Not sure quite how easy it is to accidently find something unsavoury- I know it’s easy enough to find when you’re looking for it… 😉

Use safesearch on google

PC in the lounge where everyone can see it, and restricted access for all other devices, TBH the only sure fire method I’ve found of stopping my 12yr old lad is taking his itouch away from him.

nickc – Member
PC in the lounge where everyone can see it, and restricted access for all other devices

+1, I’ve worked a lot with kids over the last 20 years, and for the few that have got into internet related dangers, the common theme has been computers in bedrooms & parents not knowing what has been going on. I’ll agree, not perfect with the likes of MSN etc, but a lot of kids will be less prepared to do something in front of their parents and/or in the living room.

We had some parental controls on a PC once which son used, but it blocked everything, even the links that Dorling Kindersley supply in their range of educational books.

Nothing is 100%, so always backup with where the pc is but this is harder with internet enabled ipads and DS’s.
We also used the Windows parential controls, but found it slowed things down, so moved to opendns which also works on everything on the home network, plus you can check whats been visited.

We use K9 at home – very good and free.

This may / may not be of some interest;

http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/Parents/

My biggest concern with a lot of these ‘protect your kids’ filters and so on is that they are often (not always) created by fundamentalist religious groups and may filter not only inappapropriate sexual content but also, for example, anything related to evolution.

I’d be as reluctant to allow an unknown 3rd party decide what my kids see on the itnernet as to have no controls in place at all, to be honest,