From a father of 5 young kids (Score 1, Interesting)

I'm a strong supporter of protectionism, as is any responsible parent. If you protect your kids from getting run over by a car, why wouldn't you also want to protect them from sexual predators and pornography on the internet?

My kids, ranging from 1 to 10 years old, have been brought up in a moral environment and don't want to deviate from the rules we've established, but too often smut from the net comes knocking at your door uninvited. This is the kind of thing I've set up protections against.

I've tried a lot of the services, paid and free, mentioned on this discussion thread, but have ultimately settled on one that's partially my own invention, that works very well for us. It probably won't work as well if your kid is actively trying to be deviant, but then nothing but teaching them strong moral values can prevent that, in my opinion.

Here's what I've done:

E-mail:
My kids all have Gmail accounts. In fact, I've used Google Apps so that we have a family domain name ($10/year) and each kid has their own e-mail address (i.e. "[e-mail]"). I've then set up "passwords" on each account, which means that I made a simple Gmail filter that automatically dumps any e-mail without a specific keyword in it into the trash folder. The kids got to pick their own keyword. When they have a friend they want to e-mail with, they just tell the friend to include that keyword somewhere in the e-mail message. They actually take pride in doing this, because it's like having a secret club of people that can send them e-mail if they have the right information. This approach is somewhat like whitelisting, but with the crucial difference that it works without any maintenance at all on my part.

I also use IMAP to connect all of their accounts into my mail reader, so I know immediately when they have new mail, and I often read their messages. Yes, I'm sure there are some of you who will get all up in arms about this supposed "censorship", but I believe it's my legal and moral right to do it, and the kids have never had any issue with me doing it, so where's the problem? As a parent, it's also kind of fun to see the things your kids say as they try to be all sophisticated with this new communications medium, experimenting with smiley faces, etc.

Web:
I used to use web filtering solutions that resided on each computer. This never did work well because we (like many on /. I'm sure) have a lot of computers in our house. Inevitably one would get out of whack, and then it would take me (as the resident IT guy) forever to get around to fixing it. It was also just one more app I'd have to install and configure any time I reinstalled an operating system or bought a new computer.

Instead, I now use D-Link's SecureSpot. This is a device which sits between your modem and your router and does content filtering. This means of course that you only have to configure one thing, and that you don't have to install anything on the client computers. What's more, if you have a friend's computer on your network, you still get the same benefits, without any extra configuration. SecureSpot has lots of other features, like spam filtering and virus scanning, but I don't use any of those, they just make things too complicated. I'm also aware of a competitor to SecureSpot, called "iBoss" from "Phantom Technologies". I'm not sure which is better, they probably both would work fine.