Shield Genie

Some parental control tools are designed to actively engage with your kids, for example, letting them know when a website is blocked, and why. Others serve to monitor the children's activity, with or without their knowledge. Shield Genie falls squarely in the latter camp, but it's not as stealthy as most of its competitors. On the plus side, its $149.95 price tag is a one-time cost, not a subscription.

Global Aware Technologies, publisher of Shield Genie, was recently spun out of CTH Technologies, a company that provides security, compliance, and business intelligence for enterprises. The company's principals pointed out that CTH has been around for 13 years and has thousands of customers, so while Shield Genie is very new, it relies on "proven CTH technology."

Odd Interface
I don't doubt that Shield Genie relies on proven technology, but its user interface would have fit right in thirteen years ago. As you can see in the slideshow images, it has a blocky, dated style. In addition, it doesn't always follow the normal conventions for standard controls. For example, radio buttons are normally used for mutually exclusive settings, where only one can be chosen. Checkboxes are used for settings that can be turned on and off independently. Shield Genie frequently uses checkboxes for mutually exclusive settings, which may confuse some users.

Its HTML-based help system is also a bit off. Under Windows XP, Internet Explorer blocked the "scripts and ActiveX controls" that make the help system work. I had to click Allow Blocked Content and then confirm my choice, every time I opened the help. In addition, the help system seems to be a version or two behind the product I tested, with some configuration settings visibly absent (and therefore unexplained) in its screenshots.

Incomplete Stealth
When you install Shield Genie, it offers Stealth Mode as an option; you can also enable or disable that mode later on. However, it's not very stealthy. In stealth mode it does refrain from displaying a desktop icon, and it doesn't show up in the Start Menu or in Add/Remove Programs, but it's clearly visible in Task Manager, it shows up in the list of startup programs, and it adds not one but three icons in Control Panel.

Spector Pro 2011 installs in full stealth mode, with nothing visible in Task Manager or the Startup programs. So do PC Pandora 7.0 and WebWatcher. For all three of these products, you launch the local configuration client by pressing a special key combination and entering your password. The password-entry box doesn't offer any clue as to what program is requesting the password.

The only way to launch Shield Genie is by using its Control Panel icons; you can't launch it by finding the executable in Windows Explorer because it prevents access. The program does include an option to hide the control panel icons, but watch out: if you set it to both hide the product and hide the Control Panel icons you won't be able to launch the configuration window at all. Shield Genie will continue to send alerts and reports, but the only way to regain control of the product's configuration is to contact tech support for help.

Alert Configuration
During the setup process you configure communication for Shield Genie's alert system. You must enter an email address and a phone number for texts; you can also add a second email address. You also have to supply a web-based email account that Shield Genie will use to send these alerts, along with the password for that account.

I was leery of giving the program my email password at first. Tech support explained that there's no remote component at all to Shield Genie, so the information would never leave my test system. Had I still been concerned at this point, I could have created a new webmail account just for this purpose. WebWatcher, Spector Pro, and PC Pandora all send email alerts, but not texts.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/mmSbiCg-1O8/0,2817,2417771,00.asp

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