Our number 3 ranked product and "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award" winner, CYBERsitter from Solid Oak Software, is an excellent product. CYBERsitter isn’t one of the most well-known names in Internet filter software, which is a shame because it’s very useful.
CYBERsitter has a lot of options and abilities that make it the right choice for Internet filtering. A lot of thought must have gone into creating the program because CYBERsitter covers all the angles. You can customize your filtering with almost any program that connects to the Internet, including instant messaging programs and email accounts.
The overblocking (websites that should not have been blocked) and underblocking (websites that should have been blocked, but were not) worked pretty well in most cases, almost as good as any of the products we evaluated. One feature unique to CYBERsitter is that it is the only product to include a basic email–filtering option. Other programs don’t offer nearly as many options for email, completely blocking email instead of filtering it.
Even though CYBERsitter has all these important options, it still didn’t make it into the top slot. There’s a good reason for that. CYBERsitter doesn’t quite match up in filtering effectiveness, even though it came very close. CYBERsitter did have some problems integrating with the web browser in order to filter sites. There were a few tricks to helping it run better, and the problems weren’t enough to kill the browsing experience, but it was enough to keep CYBERsitter from the top.
CYBERsitter comes with a lot of useful features that allow you to decide just what kind of protection your computer needs and where. Not only does CYBERsitter have more features than any other program in this review, but the CYBERsitter interface allows you to customize a lot of options that aren’t customizable in other programs. For instance, CYBERsitter was the only product to include a basic email–filtering feature, even though this feature will not replace a typical Spam filtering product.
The parent (or administrator, depending on the situation) has almost complete control over what kind of content is viewable. And CYBERsitter does an excellent job of foiling attempts to change the settings by unauthorized people. Your kids most likely won’t be able to hack this one.
CYBERsitter offers excellent ways to track and monitor surfing on the computer discreetly. The program creates reports about the types of sites that are visited, keeps records of IM conversations and then emails all of the information to you on a daily basis. This can help you keep track of exactly what happens on your computer day-by-day.
If you are looking for this kind of discreet monitoring, you will especially like CYBERsitter because you can monitor the program from a remote location (anywhere with an Internet connection) and even change the settings on the filter from outside your home. This feature is useful if you are gone for long periods of time and need to change the filtering options instantaneously while away.
There are 35 available categories of content that CYBERsitter can monitor and filter. These include the standards, like sex, drugs and pornography, along with quite a few of the uncommon ones, like gambling, cults, file sharing and free email sites. You can select the ones you are concerned about and CYBERsitter will do the rest.
One useful function that is available that none of the other products have is the ability to scan your hard drive for objectionable material. It will also find any types of spying programs that may have been installed on your computer, either inadvertently or intentionally.
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