Kid Net-safety tools reviewed

Reviews of online-kid-protection software and services are few and far between these days, so hats off to PC Magazine for keeping online families up to date on what's available. Echoing what all online-kids advocates are saying, its intro says porn isn't parents' only worry. Besides the relatively rare sexual-predator danger (see "Rethinking 'stranger danger'," 6/11), there's the infinitely more commonplace teen online social scene. "Computers have become a hub for social activity. And for the most part, it is an unsupervised environment. Many parents go to sleep every night convinced that their kids are sleeping too, while some of the kids are actually chatting online with friends and strangers." As great as the Net is, for the most part, for everything from research to keeping in touch, some parents could use a little help from technology itself on the tech part of parenting. "The good news," says PC Mag, "is that the products on the market offer a variety of approaches, so finding the right solution shouldn't be too difficult." They looked at all kinds of solutions. The categories are: Filtering Software, Kids' Browsers and Services (e.g., AOL's "KOL" and "RED"), Router-Based Parental Controls, and Monitoring Software. The page layout for this resource could be a little confusing because the pages are long and have all kinds of unrelated content; so all you need is linked to from the little green-bordered Table of Contents box on the right-hand side of each page.