Centipede Networks FilterPak review

In some ways, FilterPak's filters are the strictest in this test.

We told it to block news and entertainment sites, assuming this meant the National Enquirer or the Sunday Sport. We were surprised that the filter blocked access to the CBeebies website. It also blocks the homepage of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia because it contains religious content (assuming you've activated the 'religion' filter). We'd have expected the program to be more intelligent.

Unfortunately, this rigour was not uniformly applied. The program let us view a Google image search for 'torture', with predictably unpleasant results. We were also disappointed to discover that, although there are filters for violence and criminal activity, there's no filter specifically for things such as religious and racial extremism. Worse still, even with the filters for religion, criminal activity and violence activated, the program allowed us to view the website of the armed Islamic movement Hizbullah while blocking the Church of England's website.

The strictness of its filters aside, FilterPak is the most basic program on test. It consists almost entirely of a list of filters that you can enable or disable, and has very few extra or advanced features. The virtue of this approach is that it makes the software easy to use. However, if its selling point is that it's basic but effective and unintimidating, we'd expect it to be cheaper than the other programs here.

Even if it did a consistently good job, FilterPak doesn't do enough to justify its price. Crawler Parental Controls is far more effective, and it's free.

Author: Karl Wright