Thanks to the reader yesterday who posted the comment about the latest NetGear wireless router. The fact is that the latest routers by both NetGear and Linksys have much improved parental controls. If you know what you are doing and can figure out the router interface and protocols, you can definitely set either of these routers up to do almost the same thing that iBoss does. The benefit is that both of these routers will be considerably faster than the iBoss. The downside is twofold - first, you need to be a little more technical (or patient and good at following bad directions) to set them up and second, the routers by NetGear and LinkSys don't receive the filter definition updates from iBoss. If you read my February 14 posting on the iBoss, it receives the same filter definition updates that most schools get and it is updated by iBoss regularly. That's a huge plus. You can make your own lists on the NetGear and LinkSys routers but think about how time consuming that task would be (to research and build lists of objectionable keywords and countless sites you want blocked).
But if you are savvy enough and speed is an issue for your home network, these other wireless routers may be an option for you.
Thanks again to the anonymous poster.
Just for kicks, here is how iBoss compares to other routers in terms of speed. I know NetGear isn't listed but it's pretty close to LinkSys:
You don't need to make your own list on the netgear routers. It goes through OpenDNS http://www.opendns.com/ for content filtering and is updated continually. You can select the level of filtering and customize it, but it is the same for all devices in the household. You can set up a bypass accounts that you can sign into individually by computer if you want to temporarily have a different level of filtering or bypass filtering altogether. There are more options with the iboss and it is somewhat easier, but OpenDNS does a good job with content too.
ReplyDeleteNancy
Nancy,
ReplyDeleteYour statement is true and the list from OpenDNS works...as long as the websites report their content type correctly. Many offensive sites don't bother or purposely don't report their content type in their site code so the OpenDNS list won't work unless such a site has been specifically flagged as offensive by multiple people and the OpenDNS people have added it to their exception list. iBoss get's it's list from an organization that creates filtering for many schools and that list contains many of the sites that OpenDNS misses.