If you surf the Internet as much as I do you are bound to see pictures of naked women or explicit sexual images at some point in time or the other. I do not really care as I must admit I do like some pictures if they are not too explicit (fisting and stuff) but you would really not want your child to end up looking at that, would you? Guarware comes with an interesting possible solution in iShield Plus 2.0 This program tries to cover up any picture that might be porn and has built in parental control features. If you aim at protecting your kid from accidental exposure to porn, this software might just be the one for you.iShield Plus 2.0 has all the settings put in a main control panel. There are 5 profiles pre-loaded: Default, Child, Teen, Adult and OFF. Each comes with its own set of settings and you can of course modify them to suit your needs. The problem is that the program can not assign a specific profile to a Windows user. You must always remember to turn it on whenever your kid is going to reach the computer. This feature should be modified and maybe it will be on the next update.

We have three safety settings: safe, safer and safest. With the safest setting you might see pictures of girls in bikinis and tops get blocked while they are usually allowed with the safe level. These two are aimed for the child and teen profiles while “safe” is default for the Adult profile.

iShield Plus 2 will work in three ways. Better said, it can have three actions when it detects something that it thinks might be porn on any web page. If it is operating under the child level it will cover up the entire image with a black and yellow icon. If your child gets to a web page that has the majority of pictures labeled as possible porn, all of them will be blocked or you can chose it to go to another webpage, to redirect to a safe information page. The teen profile gets a warning, the images are not covered and the adult profile can view anything without a problem. Incidents will be logged though so your wife will have proof that you surfed such pages so be careful.

Another option that is quite interesting is that of scanning the entire computer and detect all movie and image files that might pe porn. When the scan is finished you will get a report that will show thumbnails of everything found. You also have the option to delete the content you want to. This means that your kid will hate you for deleting his/her porn collection but maybe this is worth it if you do not want him/her to be exposed to such material.

To top it all off, iShield Plus 2 can monitor other categories, not just porn. You will get to see what is considered to be: Lingerie, Hate & Discrimination, Alcohol Weaponry, Drugs, Dating, Gambling, Murder, Suicide, Vulgarity, Tobacco, and Hacking. It has built in filters for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and more. You can even block all unsupported browsers. Behavior when iShield Plus detects such material is similar to that highlighted above for porn.

iShield Plus lets you go even deeper in your child’s privacy without him knowing it. The program can record Instant Messaging conversations. Lines that contain pre-loaded phrases like “home alone” are automatically highlighted when you read to conversation. Yahoo and MSN messengers are currently support it. In USA this is not warming as it does not work with AOL Instant Messenger. iShield can also block the use of around 12 peer-to-peer softwares.

The report feature in iShield Plus 2 is really good. Your logs will look very complete and you will basically know anything bad that happened since you installed it. I tried out the software and it did block everything on adult sites and was a true protection. On the other hand huge problems were detected with iShield Plus 2.0 This software will block the use of all browsers that are not supported but it needs to know of their existence. Opera was blocked but when I tried some free Internet Browsers out there, some of the ones that are never really downloaded, I got to see all the porn I ever wanted. With messaging it is the same. By using Meebo or GAIM, you could easily avoid iShield’s porn and hate protection. With P2P the same thing happened.

The facts are simple! iShield Plus 2 is a tremendous program but if your kid is good at computers, he/she will find a way to go around it. Be sure to not let this happen!