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First Looks: WebWilly Watch 3.0a for OS/2- by Chris Wenham
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Summary: The surfing utility formerly known as NetExtra from Innoval gains some new features, the most important of which are the content blocking, or parental control features. These make WebWilly the first application for OS/2 that enables parents and guardians to protect children from obscene material on the web.

Aside from the advanced bookmarking features, page mining capabilities (for offline browsing) and dated logs of your browsing history, WebWilly Watch for OS/2, formerly known as NetExtra, now adds the power for parents and guardians to block obscene and potentially harmful material from children who surf the net. In a nutshell, it means no more sneaking peeks at the playmate of the month for Junior anymore.

Easy Setup

Installing WebWilly is remarkably easy, and takes a "wizard"-type approach (.GIF, 13K) to configuring the program for use. WebWilly can work alongside both WebExplorer, Netscape Navigator 2.02 and the Netscape Communicator Beta for OS/2. It'll ask for a password and use this to protect the parental control configuration, page mining features and program exit functions.

Surfing With WebWilly

For you and me, WebWilly's (.GIF, 3K) most appealing features are the advanced bookmarking, extensive logs of your surfing history and page mining. WebWilly's bookmarks can be arranged and sorted in a tree so you can set them out in a logical fashion, but these seem to take a back seat to the bookmarking features of Netscape, meaning you'll probably make more use of WebWilly's bookmarks whenever you're in WebExplorer instead. The browsing history feature is excellent for either browser, however, since it not only keeps a searchable log of every site you've ever visited (while WebWilly was running too) but it can also keep monthly logs all the way back as far as you care. If you remember a web site from months or years ago and can't remember what it was, WebWilly could come to the rescue.

Page Mining is most useful for downloading an entire site and browsing it while offline, or as an advanced cache for when you're still on-line.You can set up multiple "agents" that can refresh the offline copy of one or more sites at a time. So for example, you could create a page mining agent called "Daily" that checks all of the sites you visit daily and downloads the first 1 or more levels of pages deep for browsing later.

Parental Control

For parents and guardians who are concerned about the presence of easily downloadable smut on the Internet, WebWilly offers a pretty good deal of protection and blocking. The program monitors both the addresses of the web sites that are being visited as well as the content of the pages themselves. While obvious sites like Playboy and Penthouse are blocked at the URL level, WebWilly is still capable of nailing sites with unrecognized URLs that have "bad" words in them. Try to load these up in the browser and you'll just get WebWilly's "Sorry, you can't go there" (.GIF, 21K) page instead.

In the parental control configuration notebook (.GIF, 17K) there are many options for deciding how WebWilly should judge a page before blocking it. You can add your own list of undesirable web sites and words, or restrict browsing completely to only your list of "good" sites. Pages can also be blocked if they contain 1-900 numbers, preventing Junior from running up your bills and listening to porn on the unfilterable telephone.

Plus, WebWilly can also prevent your child from accidentally giving out your home address or telephone number in an internet chat room. Something that may be of special concern to parents afraid of pedophiles luring young innocents away. This feature does not seem to work with chat rooms that exist outside the browser, like Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients.

Thwarting WebWilly

Of course, any kid left on his own with a computer is probably going to try and circumvent WebWilly's protection through one trick or another, and this is where WebWilly's design becomes important. First of all, the obvious "Exit" command is password protected. Either from WebWilly's own menu of from the window list, you can't shut it down without knowing the password.

Secondly, WebWilly does not make use of a proxy server to do it's work, so going to Netscape or WebExplorer's configuration is not going to do Junior any good. Nor must the browser be started by WebWilly (although it can be). So if you start the browser and then WebWilly, or vice versa, the blocking still works.

But I did find a couple of ways to thwart WebWilly without having to know the password. Any process killer such as Process Commander, the freeware go.exe and many other downloadable programs can be used to forcibly terminate WebWilly. It also seems that WebWilly needs to "see" the titlebar of the browser as a handle to know what it's doing, so if you use any utilities such as Smart Windows or ScreenSpace -- both of which can hide a window's titlebar -- it could be used to make WebWilly, in a sense, "blind".

Therefore I advise anyone who wishes to use WebWilly to combine it with a few other measures of common sense. Make sure there aren't any process killers installed on the machine. Invest in a program such as Workplace Security (also found in Object Desktop Pro) to lock down the icons of the command prompts and any other program you can't do without that could be used to kill the WebWilly process or disable it's ability to start up again. And lastly, use the boot-up password feature found in most modern BIOSes to prevent your child from rebooting or power-cycling the computer after he's taken WebWilly out of the startup folder.

Safe Surfing

While it's not OS/2 e-Zine!'s policy to suggest how you should raise your children, it's our recommendation that the best child protection scheme is still your own physical presence in the room while your child uses the computer. What WebWilly affords you is more like an extended leash, giving you the freedom to answer the door or the phone, make yourself some lunch and do other brief activities that takes you out of visual-range of the computer. Because if your child is one of those who always finds the cookie jar and the birthday presents, then he or she may be resourceful enough to eventually find a way around this program if given enough unsupervised time to do it in.

WebWilly Watch 3.0a

by Innoval
MSRP: US$20
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