I guess internet parental control app that runs on the desktop would be an example of the general category of software I am interested in. But I want something easy to customize, e.g. like an SDK for making my own parental control or similar url filtering/blocking apps.
ok, one such is Komodia Redirector http://www.komodia.com/quotes/RedirectorQ.pdf and they explicitly name “parental controls” as one of the possible applications.
unfortunately this thingy is real expensive.
SquidGuard is worth a look. GPL.
If you’re looking for functional rather than pretty, check out http://www.privoxy.org/ . It will do damn near anything once you set up the *nix style config files correctly.
I use the Windows version as a service to provide proxy, privacy, & filtration
It doesn’t have anything like intelligent content filtering on content. Although it seemsthat could be added readily enough by anyone conversant in C.
privoxy does look good, thanks, but I am not able to make my Firefox 3.5 work with it. When I set Internet Explorer to use privoxy, it works and e.g. shows privoxy’s configuration page as expected. But when I set it for Firefox, it stops showing any pages at all, as if it were disconnected from internet.
further experiments show that my Firefox does work with other “regular” proxies. I guess it is unhappy specifically about privoxy.
ETA: oops, never mind, works now. Maybe I specified wrong port. Or maybe reinstalling Firefox helped.
no, the problem turns out to be that Firefox understands proxy ip “localhost” but does not understand proxy ip “127.0.0.1” :smack: