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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Father's Day is Sunday, which means that it's time to celebrate Dad. He and Mom most likely raised you with the help of relatives, babysitters, and teachers, as well as a few books, toys, and TV programs. These days, however, there are also a variety of online resources designed to make good parenting a little bit easier.

From finding nannies to keeping children occupied, there's a site for any parent in this roundup.

Parent resources

Babble Soft After you sign up for Babble Soft, you're brought to your home page, which allows you to input information about you and your child. The site also asks you to input your baby's caretakers, including their name and relation so you have everything you need to identify them.

The software's Baby Insights page is fantastic. Whenever someone feeds your baby, puts your child down for a nap, or gives them medicine, they can put that information into the online software. You can then access that from work to see if your children are getting what they need. Parents can also run reports to see how much their babies are sleeping, how much they've been eating, and more. Those reports give you a full printout of exactly what's been going on in your child's life. Babble Soft is an outstanding tool. It's just too bad it costs $37.95 for 12 months after a free trial.

Babble Soft lets you track your child's activities no matter where you are.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

BabyCenter BabyCenter provides you with help as your children grow from a newborn to a "Big Kid." When you sign up for the site, you'll find a variety of articles providing guidance on raising your children at different stages in their lives. Most of the articles are worth reading and offer some great insight.

But the real value of BabyCenter is the community. The BabyCenter Community allows you to chat with other parents who are going through the same experience of raising their children. You can get support for issues, give advice to other parents, or simply post questions you're curious about. Since the site has a social element, you can also make friends with other parents and discuss things with them privately. It's a great service.

BabyCenter lets you make friends with other parents.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Care Care is basically a search engine that helps you find babysitters, nannies, tutors, pet caretakers, or housekeepers in your area. The people providing that service list their expertise. In their listing, the service providers give information about themselves, how they can be contacted, and after registering for the site, you can also get in touch with their references.

Care helps you find nannies in no time.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

There's a cute new payment service just launching: BillMyParents. It's a way that kids ("tweens," according to the founder) can shop in online stores and easily spend their parents' money--if their parents later agree to buy them the stuff they want.

The system puts little BillMyParents buttons next to items in online retail. To check out, kids write optional notes to their parents about the items they want. Parents get e-mail notifications and can approve and pay for individual items directly.

Kids never get access to their parents' credit cards. And parents don't have to visit the store sites their children found the items on.

Jim Collas, CEO of SocialWise, which makes BillMyParents, says it is "focused on the communication between tween and parent." As inclined as I am to disparage systems that put the Web in the middle of the parent/child relationship, I actually think this idea works. It doesn't reduce or remove communication in a family, in fact it could increase it. And it makes it easier to mark, track, and purchase online items.

When a child sends parents a request through BillMyParents, the parent can buy the item directly from the request page. Or, of course, deny it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

BillMyParents is also focused on making money. Collas points to the $28 billion spent online by the "youth demographic," and says he's also eyeing the $40 billion spent offline on products researched on the Web. Much of this commerce, he says, goes offline because the child can't buy the item. BillMyParents will make money from transaction feeds.

The challenge of BillMyParents is that is has to be integrated into online retail sites. At launch, the company has no customers to announce. The company will have an Amazon affiliate store, though, which will let any item on that service get routed through BillMyParents for approval, and then back to Amazon for purchase.

But Collas said he believes his solution will increase commerce on the sites it ends up on. He says the BillMyParents buttons can be placed on item pages, not in an online store's shopping cart, which makes the kids' "check-out" that much easier. Also, he points to the opportunities to integrate with sites and online worlds that sell virtual goods.

A secondary line of service, a debit card that can be loaded up with a kid's allowance, is coming in the future. Also, when I jokingly asked Collas if he was going to release services like "BillMyHusband" or "BillMyWife," he said seriously that he has registered many other "BillMy" domains. He does not have plans to expand his market from the youth demographic, though.

I believe this service's primary challenge is one of sales. It needs to get some merchants on board. PayPal could compete with it. So could the credit card companies. But those companies could also buy BillMyParents. It's a smart business.

There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.

Glide's circular interface with pie-chart divisions makes navigating a more interesting task.

(Credit: Glide)

The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail account in Glide that they can control access rights too, similar to how Glide allows rights controls for attachments if you're familiar with that system.

From there, parents will be able to access the child's e-mail from a drop-down menu on the upper right corner of the e-mail interface. When the parent enters the child's account, they can approve each e-mail individually or as a group by clicking on the e-mail and clicking Approve or Delete. Since all e-mails sent to the child default as unapproved until given a green light, parents don't have to worry about children seeing unauthorized e-mails.

Both children and adult can take advantage of the new drawing and coloring tool. It works a bit like MS Paint, except with Glide's collaborative tools built in, and a much more interesting interface. Colors appear as crayons in a box, and users can choose from preselected backgrounds, a blank canvas, or images in their own libraries to drawn on. Standard drawing tools are included, such as a freehand pen, line tools, typographic text, and shapes. Glide Draw also offers zooming and undo/redo. The tools can be accessed from the Draw text link at the bottom of Glide's main interface.

Existing features in Glide have also gotten a power boost. E-mail import and export capabilities have been overhauled. An Import button will copy the body text of an e-mail into a Glide Write document, while the new Export button creates a PDF, DOC, DOCX, or RTF out of the body text. Attachments can also be one-clicked to a destination folder, and Glide Writer and the Glide e-mail interfaces have seen a design redo.

Interestingly, the Glide Application suite has been integrated into Glide e-mail, so that the word processor, presentations application, photo editor, and collaborative tools are available to all e-mail recipients. Even if you're not a Glide user, the tools will be available to you. This includes automatic group discussions and online meetings. Utilizing Glide Desktop Applications (download for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris) participants can synchronize the files that they're discussing.

Webkit-based browsers Safari and Chrome also earned full support in the Glide OS improvements.

Its stunning cross-platform usability and its equally impressive granular rights-granting for file-sharing and attachments aside, performance improvements appear to not have been part of the most recent Glide OS update. It's not the fastest loading Web application, but users looking for something that will function anywhere on almost any desktop or handheld should check it out.

Editors' note: In the original version of this blog, we used the beta name for this product. The official name is OnlineFamily.Norton.

Back in February, Symantec debuted a new security program that sought to help parents talk to their kids about how they use the Internet. OnlineFamily.Norton has been a free beta since then, but this Monday at midnight, the program will leave beta and remain free at least until the end of 2009. The program was originally called Norton Family Online.

OnlineFamily.Norton makes your child's surfing habits available from any browser.

(Credit: Symantec)

This parental control suite provides parents with an interesting and possibly unique approach to online child safety. OnlineFamily.Norton does provide a blacklist, boilerplate for most parental control software. However, the suite offers more than just an On/Off switch, and provides tools that encourage communication between parents and their children.

There's a wide range of control over what sites a child can access. The restrictions can vary from a strict no-access policy that can block specific sites and site categories, to a more lenient notification e-mail sent to the parents when the child visits sites that parents merely want to be warned about. On the child's side, kids are given the option of e-mailing their parents when they're blocked--if the parents allow those e-mails in the first place.

Jody Gibney, product manager for OnlineFamily.Norton, said, "We want to encourage a different philosophical approach, encouraging parents to talk to kids instead of setting up an adversarial relationship." To further that, the program's House Rules can be customized to suit the needs of individual children within each family, a useful feature since a teenager will have different browsing and social-networking interests than an 8-year-old.

The dashboard for OnlineFamily.Norton will change slightly from the beta release, highlighting the options available to parents.

(Credit: Symantec)

It's impossible for a kid not to know that OnlineFamily.Norton is running on their computer's background, since it warns them that it's activated. The log-in process requires that the Norton Safety Minder for Windows and Mac be installed first. The program allows kids to view the House Rules independently of their parents. Parents, on the other hand, are able to see what sites their children have been visiting, including search results for terms the child has queried.

However, the program doesn't provide "reams and reams of information," as Gibney put it. "We want to provide [parents] with enough information to start a discussion without overwhelming them." The program will flag social-network profile inconsistencies, such as discrepancies in a child's stated age or name, for example.

The differences between the beta and the free version are apparently limited to interface enhancements designed to streamline the setup process and provide better access to the information that OnlineFamily.Norton collects. The free version will be available at midnight on Monday. A one-year subscription starting January 1, 2010, is expected to cost $60.

There are very few ways to view job openings, book a vacation, or find that perfect home without plowing through multiple websites and advertisements. Alertpedia is a useful website that saves you time by performing filtered searches based on what you're looking for. The search results are delivered in the form of a daily, weekly, or immediate email. The best part? No sign-up required.

Unlike websites like Kayak or Crazedlist, who deliver an immediate search result, Alertpedia saves you time by doing an automatic, periodical search. You can search for weather, traffic, jobs, travel, YouTube videos, and other categories.For example, if you are on a hunt for the best (cheapest) plane tickets from San Francisco to New York, fill out a one-time alert request, specify how often you'd like to be alerted, and Alertpedia takes care of the rest. You will receive weekly or daily emails with a summary of the current travel deals. This can be handy if you're booking travel in advance since it saves you time performing repeat searches on travel websites.

(Credit: Sharon Vaknin/CNET Networks)

A great application for Alertpedia would be for moms and dads. Parents can be alerted on recent health hazards such as the recent breakout of salmonella, or tips for dealing with asthma. Alerts on product recalls, like the recent hooded sweatshirts are also valuable for the health and safety of children.

Though Alertpedia can be very practical, it does have a few weaknesses. When using the service, users should be careful about what filters they choose in their searches. A very general filter, or search term, could lead to endless results. On the other hand, a very specific term could minimize results and render the service useless.

Alertpedia is best utilized for those looking for information on an ongoing basis. Users can not filter their alerts based on travel dates, or set a specific price range for their Craig's List searches. Most importantly, the results are not delivered right away. For those looking for immediate results, other search engines would be more useful.

Someday my son will hate me for this, but I just implemented a new way to record his daily achievements: A dedicated Gmail account. I got the idea for this tip from John Girard, CEO of Clickability, who sends tagged emails to his Outlook account. Anything with his special code in the subject means it's news about one of his kids, and he has filters to archive those notes into an offline file.

But it's so easy to set a new Gmail account, I thought, why not just do it this way? Plus, I can give account access to my wife if she wants to see the archive.

You can set up Gmail to forward all emails it receives to another account, which I'm doing as well. This other account is read by a PC-based email client and archived to my hard disk, which is backed up on Carbonite, so if the Gmail account goes offline I still have the emails saved.

I had been using Twitter a bit to record the cute moments of my son's development, but this solution is better: It's more private and more archival.

Of course, one could use this tip for archiving almost anything. Although it's not elegant, it sure is easy.

See also: The Parent Hacks blog.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

AT&T rolled out a new security portal today called Smart Limits. Designed for parents who want to monitor all aspects of their children's activities, the site provides instructions for parental controls of the Internet, cellular phones, television watching, and regular landline telephone calls. There is one catch, though: all the information is for AT&T's services, so it's not going to work on your Comcast cable box or Verizon cell phone.

There's obviously a big push for parental controls, as Windows Vista and Web services like MySpace recently have pushed out new child protection initiatives. Instead of a Web site telling you how to access and monitor these controls in the individual services, I'd like to see AT&T put together a site that would allow you to control and manage all these services remotely. Combine that with Inilex for your car, and your kids will do nothing without you knowing.