Webware

(Credit: Netgear)

I am not a big fan of parental controls, but that might be just because I'm not a parent.

If you are not like me and have been wondering if paying a yearly fee for the comprehensive parental control feature that accompanies the lackluster iBoss router is worth it, Netgear may have just made your life a lot easier.

Netgear announced Tuesday the release of Live Parental Controls, a comprehensive Web-filtering feature it has developed in collaboration with OpenDNS.

The new feature enables parents and small businesses to restrict Internet access to all the devices that connect via the router, with filtering based on more than 50 categories of content. The Live Parental Controls incorporate a comprehensive set of filtering features including some not available in other parental control solutions, such as remote management from mobile devices and highly flexible settings.

The best things about the new features are that they're free and are included with Netgear's new routers. The first one that comes with this is Netgear's Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 router. Netgear plans on putting Live Parental Controls in its future routers and Internet gateways.

The WNR2000 is available immediately and costs less than $80, which is very good for a Wirelesss-N router and it's a great deal considering the new Web filter, especially when compared with the iBoss.

Hands-on testing and a full review of Netgear's Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 wireless router will be available soon.

There are lots of Internet filtering products on the market that enable parents to block certain types of websites such as pornography, hate sites, or sites that promote alcohol or drug use. Most of these products run on PCs or Macs by sitting between the operating system and the browser and checking any requested sites to make sure they're not blocked. The products generally do a good job blocking requests from protected PCs, but most don't work with game consoles, Wi-Fi-equipped iPhones or iPod Touches, or any other device that isn't running the software.

Netgear is about to ship routers designed to simplify the process by allowing parents to block content on any device using the home's wired or wireless network.

Netgear routers to offer in-cloud filtering

(Credit: Netgear)

The new routers, which will be available in early September, will be equipped with firmware that configures them to use OpenDNS' domain name server to look up the actual IP address of any site someone tries to visit. If that site isn't on the blocked list, it will be displayed. But if a parent has blocked that site, the user will instead be sent to a page that informs them that the site they tried to access is blocked.

Some existing Netgear routers can be upgraded with the new OpenDNS-compatible firmware starting August 10th.

Because the filtering takes place at the router level, it works with any device in the household that uses that router including Web-enabled game consoles and Wi-Fi mobile devices. It won't, however, work with devices that don't use the home network such as an iPhone set up to use the 3G cellular network.

Like other filtering products, parents have control over the type of content blocked and have the ability to turn it off so that it doesn't prevent mom or dad from visiting any sites. There is also a "white list" feature that allows parents to exclude any site from the blocked list. Because the blocking lists are "in the cloud," parents can configure the filter from anywhere.

Before employing any parental control system, I urge parents to think about how they will or won't fit in with your family. Consider the age of the child, the child's Web surfing habits, the types of risk your child takes, and what you plan to say to your children about the filtering product. Parents should tell their kids that they're using filters and explain why they think they're necessary. Also, parents should never rely on filters as the only way to protect children--parental involvement is still important. If you decide to use a filter, consider weaning kids from them as they enter their teenage years. Eventually, your kids will be on their own and part of a parent's job is to help a child make their own good decisions. You can't rely on filters forever.

For details about the service, I spoke with OpenDNS founder & CTO David Ulevitch.

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After plenty of coverage about how its Bing search engine makes it all too easy for kids to find and view porn, Microsoft has made some changes that will make it easier for parents to block or monitor what their kids are viewing on the site.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that it is making two changes the company thinks will help address the issue.

According to the post, "explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain, which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be."

With this change, parents should be able to use parental control tools to block that domain and therefore block the images and videos. Almost all third-party filtering tools can be configured to block specific domains or sites, as can the parental controls in Microsoft Vista and Mac OS X.

Microsoft will also return the "source URL" information of specific images and videos, so if a filtering program blocks that site, it will prevent the video or image from being viewed within Bing. For example, if there is a video playing at Playboy.com, a filtering program that blocks Playboy would also prevent someone from viewing the content from inside Bing.

I tested this by right-clicking on a thumbnail of an explicit video in Bing and looking at properties. The URL of the image began with "ts3.explicit.bing.net." When I right-clicked on a sexual photograph, it contained "ts1.explicit.bing.net."

In an e-mail, Microsoft spokesman David Burt said the company has reached out to more than 25 filtering and security vendors to work with them to provide a solution for filtering explicit content while using Bing.

Bing raised the ire of some Internet safety advocates when it was discovered that all you have to do to watch an explicit video or view an image was to hover your mouse over its thumbnail within a Bing search. Although Bing's default settings would not bring up sexually explicit content, it did display an invitation saying "to view these videos, turn off safe search." One click later, the videos would start to play.

Microsoft's changes are likely to silence some--but not all--critics. Cris Clapp from the Internet safety group Enough is Enough said that "the steps they've taken are good," but added "it's important for them to make it more intuitive to guide parents to change filter settings."

These new features should also make it easier for schools and businesses to filter student or employee access to explicit content.

I'm pleased that Microsoft responded relatively quickly to concerns about how easy it was for kids to find and view porn. But even with these changes, parents still need to stay in close touch with how their kids are using Bing or any other Internet site. Not all families will want to use Internet filters. I didn't when my kids were younger but instead had frequent conversations with them about appropriate Internet use. But these changes should be welcome news for those parents who do choose to use tools to filter or monitor their kids' access. Without filters in place, it will still be easy for kids to access porn from within Bing, but at least parents will soon be able to block it if that's what they want to do.

Yahoo has added a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that lets users filter the contents of their in-box to see only the messages from their contacts. This means that if someone's not on your contacts whitelist, you don't see their message.

Short of Yahoo Mail's built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any in-box clutter from people you don't know. However, there's some work involved on your part to build that list of contacts. To enable the feature, users must first create a Yahoo profile over at profiles.yahoo.com. Then add people they wish to list as contacts.

Besides sorting by connections, users will soon be able to sort by contacts. Here's what the in-box looks like before the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo )

And here's what it looks like after the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo)

One area where this terminology might confuse users is the difference between "contacts" and "connections." Yahoo Mail's help section refers to connections as "contacts with special status." In the case of mail, what makes them special is that you've interacted with them frequently, so the product assumes you know them. They must also confirm you as a contact before a connection is made. Contacts, on the other hand must be manually added, either through mail, or over on Yahoo's profiles site.

Yahoo Mail's senior product manager Rick Pal says this feature will only be available for Yahoo Mail users in the U.S. and Australia, and won't be rolling out to all accounts until a "few weeks" from now.

Update: Made a clarification on the difference between contacts and connections.

Previously: Yahoo puts meat on Open Strategy bones

I tested this feature quickly and with great caution on board a Virgin America WiFi equipped flight, being careful to shield the screen from fellow passengers and crew.

When I searched for a word that was sure to bring up porn, I was first warned that it "may return explicit adult content" and told that "to view these videos, turn off safe search." One click later, safe search was off and I was looking a page of naughty thumbnails. And, as advertised, hovering the mouse over a thumbnail started the video and audio. Even when playing in a small thumbnail, it was unmistakably hard core porn.

Of course, kids don't need Bing to find and view porn. You can find it with Google and other search engines, and even though Google has a filtered search option, there's nothing to stop someone from turning that off. But Microsoft makes it a little too easy. If moderate or strict filtering is on and you search for a filtered term, the site simply instructs you to click a link to "change your SafeSearch setting." If you configure Google for "strict filtering," a user who searches for a filtered term on Google simply sees that the word or phrase "did not match any documents." Of course a kid can always go in and change Google's settings but they have to know how to do it and bother doing it. Microsoft makes it all too easy.

I don't know if Microsoft plans to do deal with this issue in any updates, but regardless of whether your kid uses Bing, Google, or Yahoo, or just knows the URLs of porn sites, the only ways to protect your kids from accessing porn is either to watch them, educate them, or filter them.

Watching them might work with very young children but it's not exactly practical for teens or even pre-teens. I recommend that kids under eight be supervised when using a device with Internet access. Education will work with many kids but not all. Parents certainly have the right to set rules and guidelines and impose consequences if their kids access forbidden sites. But, let's face it, hormones, curiosity, and just plain interest in things sexual can have a strong pull on kids, especially teenage boys. Besides, some younger kids could stumble on porn if they use any unfiltered search engine, even if they're just looking for innocuous terms like "Barbie."

Filtering programs (or the parental controls built into Vista and Mac OS X) will block most porn sites, but it's not yet entirely clear which ones will prevent Bing from previewing such sites. Safe Eyes filtering software "blocks all pornographic content on Bing and Google searches out of the box," according to a post on its company blog. From my perch in the sky, I wasn't able to check with other filtering companies, but I'm betting some will and some won't.

Coincidentally, I'm writing this post on the way to Washington, D.C. for the first meeting of the Commerce Department's NTIA Internet Safety Working Group, which I serve on. I have a feeling this will come up at Thursday's meeting. As one of my fellow working group members, Internet Keep Safe Coalition President Marsali Hancock, said by e-mail, "as new technologies release it is critical that industry and child health advocates explore the potential impact on young developing minds and quickly respond to health and safety concerns."

I'm going to keep on top of this issue with Microsoft and the filtering companies and will report back as this story unfolds.

By now everyone should have the new Facebook, a redesign the company is touting as a leap forward from the previous version. In case you missed Rafe's hands-on with it last week, and our report from the press briefing the week before, the gist is that you can now filter the flow of information by groups of friends, and by application. The problem is that as a main feature, the application filtering isn't quite polished--and it shows.

Instead of putting all the information into one big stream and letting users pick how much of each type of news they wanted to receive (which was the old system), Facebook's new system relies on a set of filters to whittle down the type of content you see. It includes shortcuts to its own "apps" like photos, links, video and notes, along with third-party applications Facebook knows you use often.

Facebook's application filters are nice, but not customizable enough.

(Credit: CNET)

As of right now, you can't go out and specifically choose which of these third-party filters show up on the left-hand side of your home page. You can easily reorder where they show up in the list, but there's no way to search for new ones to add, or remove the ones that are on there, short of putting them out of sight from your main list. Compared to the Applications "start" bar, which hangs out on the bottom of the screen, it's a big step backward in terms of customization.

Facebook's introduction to the new stream feed made the mistake of describing a system where users can pick which applications they want filters for:

By default, several common Facebook applications will be listed as filters. Users can choose additional applications from a drop-down list and add them as permanent filters. The applications that users and their friends frequently use and have multiple stories available for a user to view are most likely to appear in this list. This can be a great way for your application to gain additional visibility and usage.

Only problem is, the drop-down list that lets you choose which application filters isn't picked by you, it's picked by Facebook, and it's seemingly random. If you're a developer, you want your application here. It's where people used to launch applications from prior to the last redesign, and if a user can sort out only updates from your application--regardless of how recently a user's friends last used it, it might give you more uptake. Not to mention, if you have a favorite application you could quickly add it to this list to keep an eye on everyone's latest items.

A Facebook representative told me that while the company was not giving users a way to search for applications to add to the filters "it's something we're considering for the future." The good news is that you can "keep" applications that show up on this list, however it requires dragging them up above the grayed out line. This way they'll stay there the next time you log in, even if Facebook has updated them with new applications. In my case, logging out and back in again, and even switching to various feeds of friends did not refresh which applications showed up in that list, so Facebook may be rotating in applications at random.

Feature removal
Another gripe of mine about the updated news feed is that Facebook has gotten rid of the customization features that made it so insanely personalized. You can control the flow of information by lists of friends--a process that is simple to use, but time-consuming to set up--but gone are the sliders where you could control how much of each type of news you wanted, and who you were getting it from.

I doubt many users took advantage of these throttling controls, which is why Facebook likely got rid of them in favor of per-content filters, but for power users it was a great way to completely get rid of a certain type of news while still slurping in everything else all at once. Now, if you want to filter it you have to view just a certain type of news item and no others.

Along with those velocity controls, Facebook also got rid of the no-refresh-required live feed view, and the controls that let you limit what types of stories you wanted to monitor from certain people. You can no longer say that you don't want to see pictures or notes from someone, while continuing to pull in the rest of their updates. To a degree Facebook has built these into the new news feed, letting you "hide" people, although this is like scorching the earth when you could be pruning the hedges since it gets rid of ALL of the updates from that person.

In many ways Facebook has simply dumbed the feed down, which is great for mainstream users with a lot of friends, but it's sad to see some of that fine granular control go away--complete with all my old settings. Besides design, that was one of the things that really set Facebook apart from MySpace, and I'm sad to see it disappearing with each new feature release.

We last took a look at the iTunes plug-in The Filter way back in 2006, so it's high time to see what this alternative to the Genius playlist is up to. Of course, when it first came out there was no Genius playlist, nor a Mac version--now that there's both, does it hold up?

Certainly the most obvious benefit is that although you do need to register to use the playlist, you don't need to hand over your credit card number to this Peter Gabriel-supported plug-in. These days many people probably don't care, but to me this is a strong vote in The Filter's favor.

Paranoia aside, The Filter seems to have made some serious, quality improvements. It still uses Bayesian mathematics algorithms and evidence models to make its suggestions, and it still takes what feels like forever and a day to scan large collections. That's not an improvement, of course, but it no longer lives on top of all other windows, either.

Instead, its icon lives on the Quick Launch bar. Right-clicking accesses a context menu, and from there users can jump to Preferences, thefilter.com, or change the default playlist generation from being based on the song to the genre. Double-click on the icon and it automatically generates a playlist, as long as a track is currently playing. Aside from scanning your collection I found The Filter to be reasonably responsive, if not zippy.

The Taste Profiler is a mandatory aspect of using The Filter. Before it can recommend playlists, and before you even finish installing it, The Filter requires that you rate at least three musicians and movies. In addition to music and movies, you can also rate TV shows and Web-only video.

The overall experience is slower than using Apple's Genius playlist, probably in no small part because it's a plug-in. However, The Filter now works with Windows Media Player and Winamp, although not MediaMonkey, on the PC, so non-iTunes lovers will probably be willing to suffer through the one- or two-second delay in getting their playlist kicked back to them. Rolling in all kinds of videos make this even more useful to today's mediascape.

There are lots of things to like about Google's Gmail service: It's free (unless you count the text ads at the top of each window; it is available on any device with Internet access, and it's easy to use as a central repository for multiple e-mail accounts.

Unfortunately, there are also many useful features of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and other standalone e-mail programs that Gmail lacks. One of the features I miss most is the ability to sort messages by sender. I used to have to page through old mail 50 messages at a time to find the one I was looking for. Now I use the service's filters and labels as a sort substitute.

If you're looking for a message from a particular person, select that person's entry in the Contacts list on the left of the main Gmail window, and copy the address in the To: field. Next, click Settings in the top-right corner of the window, and choose Filters > Create a new filter.

Find all the messages from a single person by entering their address in the From: field of Gmail's Create a filter screen.

Paste the address in the From: field and click the Next Step button. After a few seconds you'll see all the mail from that person listed at the bottom of the screen. Check Apply the label, and choose New label from the drop-down menu to the right. Enter a name for your filter, and click OK. You can select the messages you want to view in the list, or simply click Also apply filter to the xx conversations below to add all of them. Click Create Filter to return to the Filters tab of the Settings window.

Sort your Gmail messages by applying a label to a filter.

The messages you selected and all subsequent mail from that person will now be viewable by clicking the entry you just created in the Labels list on the left side of the main Gmail window, just below your list of contacts. Of course, you can also create a labeled filter to find the mail you sent to a specific address, with or without certain words in the subject or elsewhere, and with attachments.

Tomorrow: enable the hidden administrator account in Windows Vista, and password-protect the XP equivalent.

There's a new content discovery site going into private beta today: Thoof. The concept is that it knows who you are, where you are, and what you like, and picks online sites and stories for you based on that information.

Thoof users still have to submit stories to the site, and right now the only way to do that is to paste a URL into the system. That will slow down submissions, compared to having a bookmarklet or a similar quick-add feature. But I like the idea of an aggregation site that treats me as an individual, not just part of a crowd of users.

Thoof picks stories it thinks you'll like. (Screenshot edited for clarity.)

CEO Ian Clarke says Thoof knows what you're going to like, "from the first moment you visit the site." There's a lot of information feeding into the system. For example, it takes all the information your browser passes to it, such as your platform and IP (which it uses to take a stab at your physical location), and correlates that with items that other similar people have clicked on. Of course, it also records what you click on, but it doesn't yet develop a profile based on your Web history outside of Thoof or from other clues you leave on your system.

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