ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 1
Intego ContentBarrier X5 for Macintosh ©2001 - 2009 Intego. All Rights Reserved Intego www.intego.com This manual was written for use with Intego ContentBarrier X5 software for Macintosh. This manual and the Intego ContentBarrier X5 software described in it are copyrighted, with all rights reserved. The Software is owned by Intego, and its structure, organization and code are the valuable trade secrets of Intego. The Software is protected by United States Copyright Law and International Treaty provisions.
Contents 1- About Intego ContentBarrier X5 ................................................................................................... 5 Protecting Your Children with Intego ContentBarrier X5....................................................... 6 Intego ContentBarrier X5’s Features.......................................................................................... 7 2 - Filtering Internet Content.................................................................................................
Other Filtering Options .............................................................................................................. 61 E-mail Filtering ........................................................................................................................................62 Peer-to-Peer Filtering ...............................................................................................................................62 Game Filtering...................................................
1- About Intego ContentBarrier X5 Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 5
Protecting Your Children with Intego ContentBarrier X5 ContentBarrier X5 is a parental control program for the Macintosh, providing functions for parents and businesses. It is designed to filter and block certain Internet content according to the settings you choose. ContentBarrier X5 blocks adult web sites, sites with subjects not fit for children, and blocks chats when predatory language is used.
Intego ContentBarrier X5’s Features • Blocks and filters all offensive material from the Internet • Customizable profiles—if you have several children, you can adjust the settings for their age and maturity • Seamless interface with Mac OS X user accounts • Setup assistant simplifies user configuration • Adjustable levels of protection • Overview screen shows all user settings • Pre-determined filters for safe and easy content filtering • Web site blocking—block or allow specific web sites •
2 - Filtering Internet Content Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 8
The Internet: A Limitless World of Content It’s a brave new world out there on the Internet: a world of information, entertainment and fun. You can surf the web for hours, going from news sites to sports sites, from movies to music, but, sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you will come across the dark underbelly of the Internet. For not all is as attractive as it seems.
and more kids set up their own blogs to communicate with their friends, whether they are next door or in other countries. In most cases, there is nothing dangerous about what they do, but many parents are concerned about the variety of material found on the Internet. Content presenting sexually explicit images, violence, gambling, alcohol advertising, ideological extremism, etc., is easily found, either accidentally or intentionally.
children to have a certain amount of freedom. ContentBarrier X5 helps by offering the possibility of filtering the content you want to protect your children from, or by allowing access only to trusted sites or specific applications. But ContentBarrier X5 also keeps a full log of your children’s Internet sessions, so, if you want to give them freedom, you can check up on them afterwards. You can record screen shots of their computer activity, and even record what they type.
X5 lets you block access to streaming media and peer-to-peer software, as well as protocols such as FTP, conserving bandwidth and ensuring that your employees are not violating copyrights by downloading content illegally. Protecting Your Company If your employees surf sexually explicit sites while at work, this not only reduces productivity, but it may even expose you to liability for sexual harassment.
3 - Installation Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 13
System Requirements • Any officially-supported Mac OS X compatible computer running a PowerPC or Intel processor • Mac OS X 10.4 or higher • 20 MB free hard disk space Note: ContentBarrier X5 is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.4 (Tiger). Installing ContentBarrier X5 For information on installing and serializing ContentBarrier X5, see the Intego Getting Started manual, included with your copy of the program.
4 - Setting Up ContentBarrier X5 Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 15
Using the ContentBarrier X5 Setup Assistant Intego ContentBarrier X5 is installed in your Macintosh’s Applications folder. To open ContentBarrier X5, go to this folder, then double-click the ContentBarrier X5 application icon. You can also launch ContentBarrier X5 by clicking its icon in the Dock.
This assistant walks you through the configuration process, and explains the types of content that ContentBarrier X5 filters, and how this filtering is done. Click Continue to start configuring your users. If, at any time, you wish to return to a previous screen, click the Go Back button to do so.
Setting an Administrator Password The second screen of the ContentBarrier X5 Assistant asks you to set an administrator password for ContentBarrier X5. You always need an administrator password to change ContentBarrier X5’s settings. This prevents your users from accessing and changing their own settings. ContentBarrier X5 gives you two options: you can use your Mac OS X administrator password, or you can set a special ContentBarrier X5 administrator password.
ensure that, in certain environments such as schools, an administrator who can access and change ContentBarrier X5’s settings is always available. If you are using ContentBarrier X5 on a home computer, you may only have one administrator. In this case you can also use the Mac OS X administrator password. However, if you want extra security, or if you want to limit the ability to make changes to ContentBarrier X5’s settings to specific administrators, you can set a special ContentBarrier X5 password.
Automatic Updates The next screen lets you define whether ContentBarrier X5 will check to see whether it needs to update itself and its filters, and, if so, how often. By default the process will happen once a week, but you can increase the frequency by changing the popup menu to Daily, or decrease it by changing the menu to Monthly. You can also turn off this feature by unchecking the “Automatically check for updates” box, or force ContentBarrier X5 to check immediately by clicking “Check for Updates Now..
User Selection The next screen of the assistant lets you select which user you wish to configure. This screen shows all the users you have on your Mac (including certain types of non-human users created by Mac OS X or other software, such as the Guest account). There are two types of user accounts: administrators and standard users. Administrators are permitted to make system-level changes to your computer to, for example, install software or prevent programs from launching.
But if you’ve set a special ContentBarrier X5 password, even users who are administrators will not be able to make changes to ContentBarrier X5’s settings. While the ContentBarrier X5 password prevents administrators from changing the program’s settings, any user who is an administrator will be able to uninstall the program. Therefore, if you have not set a special ContentBarrier X5 password, it is best to use standard accounts for users for whom you wish to filter content.
Web Filtering Setup ContentBarrier X5 next presents you with three options for preventing the selected users from accessing certain web sites. They are: • Do not filter the web, which allows the user to access all web sites; • Block some website categories, which lets you block websites containing content belonging to a basic set of categories; and, • Only allow selected websites, which gives you the opportunity to restrict the user’s web use to only those “whitelisted” sites you specify.
boxes. Intego constantly updates its lists of suspect websites, so you don’t have to surf the web to determine which sites fall in these categories; these updates are available in the ContentBarrier X5 filters that you can download and install using NetUpdate. If you choose to only allow selected websites, your user(s) will be unable to access any website until you create a list of permitted sites. You add sites to the list by clicking the plus sign at the bottom of the screen, which puts “www.example.
Chat Filtering Setup This screen lets you decide which chat filter settings you wish to use. You have three options: • Do not filter chats: This lets users chat with no restrictions. • Block predatory content: This lets users chat, but enables ContentBarrier X5’s AntiPredator function, which filters language deemed predatory in chat sessions. (We’ll show you how to see and manage the list of “predatory” phrases in the later section, “Chat Filtering”.
Recording Setup This screen lets you keep an eye on your user’s activity, recording screenshots and keyboard activity to ContentBarrier X5’s logs. By clicking the first checkbox, you make ContentBarrier X5 take a screenshot of either the Main Window—that is, the frontmost one—or of everything visible on the computer, including additional monitors, if any, if you select All Screens from the popup menu. You can also decide how often these screenshots will be created, from one per minute to one per 999 hours.
Reporting Setup This screen lets you determine how ContentBarrier X5 reports users’ activities to you via e-mail or the web. Regardless of what you set on this screen, you can always monitor user activity by viewing ContentBarrier X5’s log, as is described in the section, “Using Logs”. If you check the first checkbox, you’ll receive reports of user activity by e-mail. Depending on what you choose in the first popup menu, your reports will be shown as “Simplified”, “Complete”, or “Compressed Complete”.
But before ContentBarrier can send you any e-mail notifications, you must tell it what e-mail server to use, who should receive the alerts, and where they should come from. To create these settings, click Configure E-mail Settings.... In the Sender box, type the e-mail address you’d like these reports to appear to come from. In the next box, add recipients by clicking the plus sign, then typing an e-mail address. To delete any email addresses, select them and click –.
When you click Configure, you’ll get a brief message that the account is being set up. After you’ve configured reporting preferences to your liking, click Continue to finish the setup process.
Finishing You’ve now reached the end of the setup process, and will see a confirmation screen. Click Configure to apply the changes you specified and go to ContentBarrier X5’s main screen. Congratulations! You’ve successfully told ContentBarrier X5 how to block users’ access to parts of the Internet. If you wish to reconfigure your users, or configure new users by using the Assistant, you can do so at any time by choosing Window > Setup Assistant while ContentBarrier X5 is running.
Setting Up Web Administration ContentBarrier X5 includes a way to monitor Internet use on your computer even when you’re far away, through a Web Administration interface that you can view from any web browser. First, you must set up a free account: if you haven’t already set up an account in the ContentBarrier X5 Setup Assistant, choose ContentBarrier X5 > Preferences..., then click the Web Administration icon. To set up your ContentBarrier X5 Web Administration account, click Register….
for ContentBarrier X5, click the Help button on that web page; you’ll be taken to an online help page.
Managing Users When you set up ContentBarrier X5, you are its administrator, with access to all the controls that limit or grant permission to access the Internet. The people you are overseeing—whether children or employees—are called users. This section shows you how to create and delete users, and control how you and other administrators see users. When you’ve finished running the Setup Assistant, and every time you launch ContentBarrier X5 thereafter, you’ll see its main window.
used functions: the “Enable protection for this user” checkbox lets you turn ContentBarrier X5’s filtering on and off, while the “Send e-mail notifications” checkbox informs you of certain access attempts. (For more information about how to change which e-mail notifications you get, see the section, “Setting Log Preferences”.) Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later offer a “Guest” account that you can configure in Mac OS X’s Accounts preference pane.
Changing User Display ContentBarrier X5 displays users by default as silhouettes with large icons in the left-hand column of the program’s window. You can change this display, customizing each user’s image, name and more. If you click the Action button at the bottom of the user list, you can choose to display small user icons and/or full names. Choose either of these options to change the display.
Exporting User Profiles After you create a profile for one of your users, you may want to apply the same profile to others. To do this, apply all the settings and filters you want to a user. Make sure you have selected that user in the ContentBarrier X5 Users list, then select Export Profile… under either the File menu or in the Action menu at the bottom of the window. Give the profile a name and save it wherever you want.
Editing User Icons ContentBarrier X5 allows you to change the icons associated with your users, even letting you add their photos. To do so, click on a user in the Users list. The top section of the ContentBarrier X5 window shows you information about this user. To change the user’s icon, click it. Choose one of the default silhouettes, or choose Edit Picture to add a photo of the user. Drag an image file to the image well, or click Choose to browse and find a photo.
5 - Using ContentBarrier X5 Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 38
Refining ContentBarrier X5 Configurations You’ve seen how to use the ContentBarrier X5 Setup Assistant to create and configure your users, in the section “Setting Up ContentBarrier X5”. You can also make changes to these configurations from ContentBarrier X5’s main window, which provides access to more detailed configuration options, as well as an overview of your users’ settings and a summary of their past activities.
The above screen displays whenever you launch ContentBarrier X5, and its contents correspond to the user selected in the Users list. It shows you the following: • User information: At the top of the screen, you see the user’s name, whether that user’s Internet access is being filtered, and whether you’re receiving reports on that person’s Internet usage. You also see a silhouette for the user, or a photo, if you have set one.
How Content Barrier Filters Internet Content ContentBarrier separates its filtering functions into four categories: Web, Chat, Applications, and Other. In addition it has the ability to record users’ actions without their knowledge (“Recorder”), and you can limit Internet access entirely according to a schedule that you set (“Schedule”). Each of these six tools is represented by a button underneath the user’s information in ContentBarrier’s main window. Next, we’ll discuss each of these tools in detail.
categories turned on—that is, blocked from this user. To prevent this user from browsing web sites in other categories, check their boxes; to allow access to categories, uncheck their boxes. (Filtering is done by analyzing keywords in web pages, as well as by a list of web sites maintained by Intego and updated regularly via NetUpdate.
Next, you can choose to allow your user to access certain web sites regardless of whether they fall into a forbidden category, by clicking on the Trusted Web Sites tab. To add a web site to this list, click the plus sign at the bottom of the screen, which puts “www.example.com” into the list. This is just a placeholder: to change it to the site of your choice, double-click that line and type the site for which you want to allow access. Note that all subdomains will be allowed, so allowing google.
In the event of a conflict—if you’ve listed the same web site listed in both the Trusted Web Sites and Blocked Web Sites lists, for example—ContentBarrier X5 will block the site. Last on the “Block selected categories of web sites” method is the Advanced tab. It has two settings: • “Enable Safe Search”, which prevents the user from seeing questionable sites in the search results of several popular search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, which offer a Safe Search feature.
Regardless of how you decide to block (and allow) access to sites, the popup menu at the bottom of this window gives you a choice of what happens when your user attempts to reach a blocked site. By default users will be sent to a web page that tells them why ContentBarrier X5 has blocked their access. To give this user access to the page—if it was incorrectly blocked, for example—click the “Allow this web site...” button at the bottom of the page.
to the entire domain (example.com in this case), just the specific web page the user attempted to access, or any web page containing a specified text. Clicking either Preview or Unlock requires you to enter an administrator’s password, preventing ordinary users from unlocking sites without permission. (The only thing a non-administrative user can do from here is click Cancel, leaving the site blocked.
Chat Filtering ContentBarrier X5 lets you filter or block chat sessions, and offers a powerful function to protect your children when using chat programs such as iChat, ICQ or AIM instant messaging software. The AntiPredator function filters chat texts for predatory language—that is, language asking for personal information about the user. This includes such questions, among others, as “are you home alone?” and “what is your phone number?”.
ContentBarrier X5’s AntiPredator comes with a set of basic text strings as filters for incoming data, and several languages are available. You can choose to display all filters, filters in a specific language, or just custom filters that you add to the list either by: • Pressing your keyboard’s Control key while clicking on a phrase, or, • Clicking the Action menu (with a gear depicted on it) below the list of phrases. By default, all the AntiPredator phrases are active when you turn on chat filtering.
Click the menu in the Kind column and select whether you want this text to be filtered for incoming chats, outgoing chats or both. It is best to filter the shortest possible texts. ContentBarrier X5 looks for the exact text you have entered in the filter, and, if the user types it differently, it will not be blocked. For example, rather than enter “my phone number is 555-1999”, it is best to enter just the phone number.
Using Schedules ContentBarrier X5 lets you set a schedule for each of your users that allows them to access the Internet only on certain days and for a certain length of time. To access schedule settings, click the Schedule button in the ContentBarrier X5 button bar. By default, all users are granted Internet access at all times. To restrict access to times you’ll specify, click “Only allow access during the following periods:”.
cells in the timetable—each cell represents one hour. You can click individual cells, or you can click and drag to cover longer periods. As you click cells, tooltips display showing the periods that you are enabling or disabling. You can allow or block access for any hour-long period on any day of the week in this manner. If you wish to allow or block access to an entire day, or if you simply want to reset access for a day to change settings from scratch, you can click the name of a day.
You can also click and drag in any direction to change cells. If, for example, you want to block access when a child comes home from school until suppertime, you would first enable all times, and then drag from 2pm on Monday to 6pm on Friday to disable those times.
A user attempting to connect to the Internet using a web browser during a forbidden period will see an alert: However, attempts to connect to the Internet with other applications might not cause an alert to be displayed; in some cases, access will simply be blocked. Some applications will display their own alerts, saying that they could not connect to the Internet. You can also allow Internet access for a limited period of time in between specific hours—for example, half an hour between 6pm and 9pm.
A dialog will appear, allowing you to set the amount of combined Internet access permitted during that period. Drag the slider to the time limit you want to allow. After you click OK, your choice will appear as a striped green area on the time chart, specifying the amount of time allowed. To change the amount of time available in a time limit, move the cursor over one of the sections with a time limit, hold down the Control key, and click. Choose “Edit Time Limit…” from the menu.
When a user has a time limit, ContentBarrier automatically displays a small controller allowing them to start and stop their Internet access period. Since you may want your children to be able to use their Mac, but not the Internet, this allows them to control the periods when they can access the Internet. The controller looks like this: To start or stop a session, just drag the slider to Started or Stopped. Below the slider is the remaining time.
Application Filtering ContentBarrier X5 gives you the option of only allowing users to access the Internet with specific applications. Rather than filter web access by category, for example, you can prevent a user from using any web browser. You can choose which applications can access the Internet; all other applications are blocked.
access the Internet with a web browser, then ContentBarrier X5’s active web filtering categories will filter web sites visited. To add applications to the list, click the + button and navigate to your Applications folder. You can also drag applications from a Finder window into this list. As you add applications, they display in the list. To remove an application from the list, click it to select it, then either click the – button or press the Delete key.
the list of allowed applications, this will not add iChatAgent. To add the latter helper application, go to your user’s log, click Applications, then find which applications have been blocked. (There may be others.) Click the disclosure triangle next to an application or helper application you want to allow, then hold down the Control key and click on its name. A contextual menu displays with one option: Allow Application.
Recording Internet Usage ContentBarrier X5 lets you keep track of what your users have been doing by secretly taking pictures of what’s on their screens, and recording what they type into a hidden log. To access the Recording controls, click the Recorder button in ContentBarrier X5’s button bar. To turn on screen recording, click the Record button underneath “Screen”.
To record all typing done by the selected user, click the Record button underneath “Keyboard”. You can then exempt the keyboard from being recorded in certain applications by checking the “Don’t record the following applications:” box and adding those applications to the list by either clicking the + button and navigating to them via the Mac OS X dialog box, or dragging and dropping the application from the Finder into the list.
Other Filtering Options While chatting and web browsing are two of the most popular Internet activities, ContentBarrier X5 also provides filtering for other types of Internet accesses. To adjust setting for these, click the Others button.
E-mail Filtering ContentBarrier X5 allows you to apply its built-in content filters to e-mail messages that are transferred through any e-mail program. Your three options for e-mail filtering are: • Allow e-mail protocols: all e-mail will be allowed through. • Try to filter inappropriate e-mails: ContentBarrier X5 will scrutinize the contents of incoming and outgoing e-mail and block those that it believes are dangerous.
Game Filtering ContentBarrier X5 can filter common protocols used by online games such as World of Warcraft and Quake. To activate game filtering for the selected user, check the “Block games” box. This setting will only block those games that access a server in a way that ContentBarrier X5 can identify: standalone games and those played within a web page probably will not be affected. There are no options for game filtering; It is either active or inactive.
Newsgroup Filtering ContentBarrier X5 can filter Usenet newsgroups, which offer discussion forums using a specific protocol and software. To activate newsgroup filtering for a selected user, check the “Block newsgroups” box. This setting will only block newsgroups that are accessed through such software, and will not affect those that are displayed on a web page. However, you can block those web sites by checking the “Newsgroups” category in the Web filtering screen.
SSH Filtering ContentBarrier X5 can filter incoming or outgoing “secure shell”, or SSH, which is commonly used for logging into remote computers. To activate SSH filtering for a selected user, check the “Block SSH” box. This setting will block communications that take place using SSH’s default port 22. There are no options for SSH filtering; it is either active or inactive.
Using Logs ContentBarrier X5 provides a complete log of all Internet activity for each user. To view the log, either: • Choose Window > Log; • Press Option-Command-L; or, • Click the Logs button at the bottom-right of the main screen. When you first open it, the Log shows a record of all users’ Web access attempts for the past week.
You can filter log entries by clicking the popup menus in the bar at the top of the window. Criteria are: • “Display activity for”: Select the name of a specific user, or leave it on the default setting, “All Users”. • “since”: Choose from Last Week, Last Month, or Forever. • “Group by”: Makes ContentBarrier X5 reorganize list entries according to user name or the date of attempted Internet access. • Whether to show all Internet accesses or only those that ContentBarrier X5 has blocked.
Setting Log Preferences Some of ContentBarrier X5’s logging behavior is determined by settings in its preferences, which you access by choosing ContentBarrier X5 > Preferences..., or by pressing Command-, and then by clicking the Reporting icon. The options are: • Record visited websites: if this is checked, ContentBarrier X5 keeps a list of all visited websites in its log. Otherwise, ContentBarrier X5 only records those websites that are blocked or filtered.
• Send AntiPredator notifications immediately: if you check this, ContentBarrier X5 will send you an e-mail whenever it detects “predatory” text strings in chat. (To learn how to manage the list of “predatory” phrases, see the section, “Chat Filtering”.) • Send reports: when checked, you’ll receive a report of the type specified periodically, with the frequency you specify.
Viewing Logs The Log window’s left-hand column lists types of log entries: Web, Chat, Applications, Session, Keyboard, Screen, and E-mail. Clicking any of these log types displays only those entries. For example, clicking “Session” tells you of times when your user attempted to use the Internet, while Applications tells you which programs attempted to connect to the Internet.
• Name refers to the domain of the site attempted (for web sites), without anything after the first “/”. To the left of the name is a disclosure triangle that you click to expose the specific pages on a given domain that one of your users attempted to reach. For example, if a user tried to reach both http://www.example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/games/shootemup, both pages will appear grouped under example.com. These individual items are called Log entries.
ContentBarrier X5 will connect to the Internet to show you what the web page looks like. This preview is “live”—that is, you see the page as it exists right now. It is possible, at times, that a web site might not be available; if so, double-clicking will not display the site. Also, some of the elements of a web page are merely parts of a page, and will display as such. The icons at the bottom of this window control how you see these previews. They are: • Left arrow: Go to the previous entry.
Clicking a disclosure triangle next to an application’s name lets you view specific, individual entries in a popup window as described above, and with the same controls. When viewing log entries for web sites, you can quickly allow or block web sites that are listed in the log by holding down the Control key and clicking a log entry. Select Trust Web Page or Block Web Page from the contextual menu that displays, and ContentBarrier X5 adds that site to the list of allowed or blocked sites.
Keyboard and Screen Logs Two of the Log entry types—Keyboard and Screen—have extra information to help you see how your users have accessed the Internet. For the Log to track such entries, you must first turn on screen and/or keyboard recording: See the section, “Recording Internet Usage” for further information. (Note that all text typed is recorded, with the exception of passwords typed into a standard password text field.
As with other log entries, you can see a visual snapshot of the user’s actions by double-clicking an application, or selecting it and then clicking the Quick Look icon in the bottom right corner. A quick look window appears, letting you page through all screen shots or keyboard captures made while that application was being used.
Exporting Log Reports You can export ContentBarrier X5 logs as HTML files to view them later in a web browser, or as text files. To do so, select one or several log categories (Web, Chat, Applications, etc.), then click the Export... button at the bottom left of the Log window. A sheet displays where you choose a name for the log, a location to save the file, and the format. ContentBarrier X5 lets you choose from three types of reports when you export logs.
About ContentBarrier X5 If you select About ContentBarrier X5 from the ContentBarrier X5 menu, the About... window gives information about ContentBarrier X5, such as the version number, your support number (a number you need for technical support), and a clickable link that creates an e-mail message to Intego’s technical support.
5 - Technical Support Intego ContentBarrier X5 User’s Manual Page 78
Technical support is available for registered purchasers of Intego ContentBarrier X5. By e-mail support@intego.com: North and South America eurosupport@intego.com: Europe, Middle East, Africa supportfr@intego.com: France supportjp@intego.com: Japan From the Intego web site www.intego.
