Products Enterprise Search CicadaSAFE

CicadaSAFE

In today's dynamic education system, it has become a mammoth task for educators to run ahead of the changes in the education system. Every educator is caught in the middle of a dilemma - schools are inevitably moving towards a more thinking and research oriented environment and yet there's a whole world of unsavory Internet sites that wait to lure adventurous young minds into their realms.

So how does an educator reconcile this conflict of encouraging young minds to venture off into searching the Internet for research purposes but at the same time ensuring that their charges do not venture off into "forbidden" sites of violence, games (which means wasting precious curriculum time) or pornographic websites?

The above dilemma just points to one thing - it is humanly impossible for educators to micro-manage a class and at the same time encourage research and independent thinking. But if dilemma is left unaddressed, it creates a two-fold problem. First up, it dilutes the focus of the student. Secondly it exposes or gives the student an opportunity to seek undesirable media and literature.

At Cicada, we have taken time and pains to understand the educator's dilemma. Through extensive hands-on research by working closely with educators we have indeed proven through studies that reconciling research with "safe" internet surfing experience is indeed a very real problem in our schools as we move into a whole new and more challenging phase in our education system i.e. Research.

CicadaSAFE is a server-based filtering product that lets users control access to undesirable web-based information. CicadaSAFE can be deployed in schools, libraries, enterprises, and any other organizations that have a need to control their Internet access.

Using CicadaSAFE, a network administrator can define a list of web sites to block for each category, which is also customisable by users. There are multiple ways to block a web site. For example, One may block a web site by blacklisting its URL, its IP address, or its domain name.

CicadaSAFE is highly customisable in the sense that it allows a user to define his/her own categories as well as key words and key phrases. One may blacklist a particular web page without blocking other pages in the same domain, or disable a word while allowing a phrase that contains the word.

Features:

• Filtering web sites by key words/phrases, URLs, IPs, domains

• Intelligently recognize key words and key phrases to be blocked. For example, the word "sex" can be blocked, while "sex education" is allowed. Having been blacklisted, "hot girls" cannot be searched, but I can still search for "hot"

• Highly customizable filtering categories and key words/phrases

• Real-time Internet monitoring and powerful statistical reports

• Internet access control

• User friendly user interface for administrators

• Multi-language support

Benefits:

• Prevent users in an intranet from accessing undesirable web sites

• More efficiently use of the network resources

• Cost effective, since only one license is needed, for the filtering server

• Easy installation and configuration

• Getting feedback from the reporting tool