Customer Reviews

Contentbarrier X5 Dual Protection

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Up until my child was 10 I used only the Mac Parental control using "strict filtering" setting, no sites allowed unless specifically added by me. By middle school this gets to be too restrictive so I purchased Content Barrier and installed and updated it per instructions. It said it was active and up to date. In order to test it I logged into the account I had restricted and opened Safari and turned off all the Mac built-in filtering. Not knowing that much about objectionable sites I set my laptop next to the main computer and used it to search for sites I would not want a child exposed to, then tried to reach them from the restricted account. Content Barrier blocked NOTHING. I tried technical support, after almost a week they wrote back that I should try reinstalling. For no apparent reason Content Barrier behaved differently after reinstalling. Now it blocks some objectionable sites, but lets many others through. Allowed through the filter were hard R movie clips from Youtube and Metacafe, also a variety of "fine art" sites that leave nothing to the imagination, sites with discussions of activity that many people would consider deviant or marginal, some sites with quite violent games. It seemed to let through almost as much as it filtered. I quickly reestablished the Mac built in Parental Control on the setting "Try to limit access to adult sites automatically". Now, between the two filters the system seems to block all the objectionable sites that were let through Content Barrier. In fact the built in Mac filter seem a little overly aggressive, but I would rather have my kids bug me to add access to an occasional site than let through all the sites that Content Barrier lets through. I am not sure Content Barrier is worth paying for, the built in Mac filters, with some tuning and elbow grease might do just as well, and is free to boot.

When I got my new iMac, I decided to upgrade from x4 (of which I let expire) to x5 of Content Barrier for the filter. The improvement over x4 enormous. For one thing, you now can integrate into search engines like Yahoo and Google so the preferences cannot be overridden. This allowed me to get rid of the secondary filter I had just for search engines.

The interface has changed, but I like that the allowed and blocked sites are now on two different tabs.