After killing Norton SafeWeb, Symantec decided it would be a great idea to also kill K9 web protection ? a popular parental control App.
On August 1, 2016, Blue Coat, Inc. (K9?s parent company) was acquired by Symantec?. As can be imagined Blue Coat and Symantec had a handful of similar products and unfortunately, it didn?t make sense to maintain two competing products. it was decided to ?end-of-life? K9 Web Protection.
Effective immediately, K9 Web Protection is no longer available for purchase or download. Technical Support for K9 will end on June 30, 2019.
If you are using K9, you need to find a replacement very soon. If you are looking for suggestions, I would recommend going with some DNS filters that do what they used to do (and are easy to use). That’s my top list:
1- Security Filtering
If you are looking for a security filtering only, there are 2 free services that I recommend: Quad9 and CleanBrowsing. They both block access to malicious and phishing domains and did very well on my comparison research. To use any of them, that?s what you need to do:
- Quad9: Switch your DNS to 9.9.9.9
- CleanBrowsing: Switch your DNS to: 185.228.168.9
I did not include OpenDNS in this list, because none of their free IP addresses are blocking malicious domains anymore.
2- Security + Pornography blocking
If you need to block pornographic content as well, you have a few options. The most well known solution is OpenDNS, but it doesn?t really have the same level of filtering they used to do (they do not enforce Safe Search for example). For a good level of filtering, CleanBrowsing is the closest. But OpenDNS & Yandex also restrict access to some adult content. This is what you need to do to use any of these 3:
- CleanBrowsing: Switch your DNS to: 185.228.168.168 (or 185.228.168.10 for a less aggressive filtering)
- OpenDNS: Switch your DNS to 208.67.222.123
- Yandex: Switch your DNS to 77.88.8.7
On my comparison of Porn filters, I list some other free DNS resolvers that you can try.
Let me know what you think.
