Blue Coat Systems, Inc., the leader in secure content and application delivery, today announced K9 Web Protection, a free Web filter that gives parents control over their family's use of the Internet. K9 Web Protection can block more than 55 different categories of content, including pornography, hate speech and sites that promote violence or permit gambling. It enables parents to monitor and control what sites their children access, and enables them to block offensive or potentially dangerous sites, including the popular Website MySpace.
Parents in the Internet age face a new set of challenges. Recent news stories about the potential dangers of sites such as MySpace, some with tragic consequences, have motivated many parents to seek tools that can help address this critical challenge. With K9, parents can decide which types of sites are acceptable to visit, and which ones are not. K9 makes it easy for parents to let children explore and learn on the Internet, while remaining safe.
"We believe children's safety on the Internet is a worldwide social issue that requires local community action and parental involvement," said Nigel Hawthorn, Vice President of International Marketing and Channels for Blue Coat Systems. "Many of us at Blue Coat are parents who have struggled with these issues ourselves. As a successful vendor of powerful filtering to Fortune 500 companies, we realised that the most valuable thing we could offer was a family-friendly version of our commercial-grade Web filtering service for home users. And we've made it free so any parent can take action now!"
A Family-Safe Internet Experience
Blue Coat K9 Web Protection is a content filtering solution for the home computer. Its job is to provide a family-safe Internet experience, where parents control the Internet content that enters their homes. K9 Web Protection implements the same enterprise-class Web filtering technology used by Blue Coat's Fortune 500 customers around the world, wrapped in simple, friendly, and reliable software for a family's Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer.
Blue Coat's unique Web filtering technology divides Internet content into more than 55 categories. These categories are stored in the master Blue Coat database, through which Blue Coat maintains and updates more than 15 million Website and domains ratings. A Website will fall into one or more of these categories, based on the content of the site. To meet a family's particular needs and preferences, parents can configure the software to block or allow specific categories.
K9 Web Protection is different from other solutions for the home in several important respects:
- Highest Level of Accuracy - Blue Coat's filtering database receives and rates over 50 million requests every day, making it the most accurate and relevant content filtering database available. Rather than downloading a static database with "stale" data that gets periodic updates, K9 Web Protection uses a centralised database that is constantly up-to-date. Communication with the database is fast and won't clog a home's Internet connection or slow down a computer.
- Dynamic Real-Time Rating (DRTRT) - Blue Coat's patent-pending DRTR technology uses statistical analysis and artificial intelligence to rate new or previously unrated Web pages. DRTR is highly accurate in identifying pornography sites. This focus for DRTR is particularly important because these kinds of sites are constantly - daily and even hourly - popping up on the Internet, and no static database can keep up.
- Ease of Use - K9 Web Protection installs quickly and easily. Automatic updates of the K9 Web Protection application ensure that families are always protected by the latest features. By electing to block sites known as spyware/malware sources, families can dramatically reduce their computer's rate of infection by unwanted software. K9 will automatically update as newer versions become available.
Unlike other filtering solutions, K9 Web Protection ensures the highest level of protection by building the most relevant ratings database available. Its effective coverage includes more than a billion Web pages.
Future versions of the product will include chat and instant message blocking, multiple user profiles, and Macintosh support.
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