PC Magazine: At Home: Cybersitter 2001

Cybersitter attacks offensive Internet content with pit-bull-like tenacity in newsgroups, chat, and e-mail. The program does this through a combination of highly tailored filtering capacity and recognition of a wide variety of questionable content on individual sites.

The single-floppy-disk installation is a snap, and the simple tabbed control panel, while not as graphical as Net Nanny's interface, still allows for quick setup. As with Norton Internet Security 2001, Cybersitter's filter lists are proprietary and not viewable. Parents can customize blocking on the Web, AOL Instant Messenger, newsgroups, FTP, and IRC. Attempts to access blocked content are logged, and daily reports can be e-mailed to parents. We were disappointed that you can't assign individual settings for each user, but Cybersitter does use the Windows log-on name in reports. You can also temporarily disable filtering for adult use of the system. We really liked Cybersitter's unique time-out feature, which restarted filtering after a set time if we forgot.

Second only to the Norton suite in the level of subject drill-down, Cybersitter has 30 categories of filters to choose from. Default blocking includes sex, illegal activity/drugs, and hate/intolerance categories. Additional options include cults and gambling sites, as well as tattoo and—our favorite—Pokémon sites.

Cybersitter is one of the few filters besides AOL Parental Controls that block AIM. When this feature is enabled, the AIM client won't start; the user gets a "lost Internet connection" message instead. With Yahoo! Messenger, Cybersitter goes even farther, allowing chat but blanking objectionable words.

Cybersitter was effective at stopping almost everything we threw at it, with a few anomalies. For example, it thwarted a pro-marijuana site, but not a marijuana seed mail-order site.