Norton Online Family To Leave Beta, Remain Free

[Peaches]

April 22, 2009 9:00 PM PDT

Norton Online Family to leave beta, remain free

by Seth Rosenblatt

Back in February, Symantec debuted a new security program that sought to help parents talk to their kids about how they use the Internet. Norton Online Family has been a free beta since then, but this Monday at midnight, the program will leave beta and remain free at least until the end of 2009.

This parental control suite provides parents with an interesting and possibly unique approach to online child safety. Norton Online Family does provide a blacklist, boilerplate for most parental control software. However, the suite offers more than just an on/off switch, and provides tools that encourage communication between parents and their children.

There's a wide range of control over what sites a child can access. The restrictions can vary from a strict no-access policy that can block specific sites and site categories, to a more lenient notification e-mail sent to the parents when the child visits sites that parents merely want to me warned about. On the child's side, kids are given the option of e-mailing their parents when they're blocked--if the parents allow those e-mails the first place.

Jody Gibney, product manager for Norton Online Family, said, "We want to encourage a different philosophical approach, encouraging parents to talk to kids instead of setting up an adversarial relationship." To further that, the program's House Rules can be customized to suit the needs of individual children within each family, a useful feature since a teenager will have different browsing and social networking interests than an 8-year-old.

CNET - http://news.cnet.com/security/

[johnpol78]

it is a good software that will help the children to learn more about the browsing the internet . these is a good security software .

this is a good information so that most of the people can learn more about the online Norton. with the help of this software parents can learn their parents about the internet explorer.