Procon Latte: Content Filtering Made Easy

By: JP Smith | Published: July 6, 2009

Categories: Internet, Safety and Security

You probably remember programs like Net Nanny. They were made to help parents keep their kids safe online. From everything I hear and read, it is still going strong and offers a lot of options that include checking on everything your kids do online, including messaging and their interactions on social networking sites. So, there is definitely no knock on what it can do. 

However, for right now, my son is pretty young.  He is computer-savvy for his age (got his first laptop at 18 months).  But, when he's online (and supervised), he's looking up information on Lego or playing games on a children's site. 

Still, even with us minding him closely, we may still leave him playing a game or hunting for Lego kits. So, I want to filter content just in case he miskeys a URL -- I don't want him ending up some place he shouldn't.  A while back, I came across Procon Latte.  It is a content filtering plugin for the Firefox browser that has a pretty good feature set.  While it's not super-powerful or a full-featured suite for all web applications, it works great if you're like me and have younger children.

The interface is pretty straight-forward.  The first thing you'll want to do is set a password.  While you're there, you'll want to set it up so that you're in control of when and how this feature gets disabled. This means preventing the plugin from being uninstalled without password and hiding it from the toolbar.

You can even set it up to enable right-clicking to add a site to a list of those to be blocked or a list of those to be approved.

Of course, it doesn't stop there.

The real power in Procon Latte is how it looks at a sites contents or URL to determine if your child should be granted access.  You have a predefined list of words to look out for (you also have the ability to add more as you need them).  You can tell Procon to look on the page, URL or both for words you're concerned about.  So, if a site has 'XXX' in the URL, it gets blocked.   I won't run down the list of the words you can block but, as an adult, I am sure you get the idea.

Another cool feature is the profanity filter.  So, you can replace certain words with characters of your choosing.  So, a certain word for female dog can be replaced with '*****'.

The real selling point for me (besides the plugin being free of charge), is that it doesn't require a particular operating system to run.  We run both Windows and Linux in my house so, I can have this plugin set up on both.

If you're a Firefox user (and, why wouldn't you be) and you have kids or want to block certain content, I encourage you to grab this plugin.  It's not a 100% solution but, it is great for giving folks like me some peace of mind regarding my child's time online.