Together, URLfilterDB and ufdbGuard offer a unique set of features, all aimed at protecting your private network and reducing network bandwidth usage. These features include:
- URL filtering
- Advertisements blocking
- HTTPS proxy tunnel protection
- Blocking adult images produced by search engines
- Controlling HTTPS usage
- Content scanning: this method blocks access to web pages based on the occurrence of “bad” words in the content.
- Artificial intelligence: a variant on content scanning, intended to render more accurate results.
- Blacklists: this method blocks access to web pages based on their being listed in a website category to be blocked.
URLfilterDB uses the last method as the fastest and most accurate method for URL filtering available. Navigate to our product comparison page to find out why and how using a blacklist filtering method makes URLfilterDB superior to competitor’s products.
URLfilterDB blocks up to 24 categories of unwanted web content:
- Advertisements
- Adult & sexually explicit
- Audio & video
- Chat
- Dating & Personals
- Drugs
- Entertainment
- External Applications
- Finance & Investment
- Forums
- Gambling
- Games
- Hacking & Warez
- Jobs
- News
- Peer-to-peer (P2P)
- Shops
- Sports
- Toolbars
- Travel
- Violence & Hate
- Web Proxies & Tunnels
- Weblogs & private sites
- Web-based email
HTTPS is a protocol that implements a strong encryption layer around the HTTP protocol. Data sent across the Internet using HTTPS is secure and cannot be decrypted and read by any eavesdropper. This makes HTTPS a useful protocol for secure online transactions.
Searching for images with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN may allow users to view adult images. These cannot be blocked in a simple way, since it would be undesirable to block all images from a search engine. Several search engines offer a safe-search* feature, which blocks most adult images. Setting the safe-search parameter in ufdbGuard enforces the safe-search policies of these search engines. The default value for the parameter is ON. The safe-search feature enforces safe searches for the following search engines: A9, Alltheweb, Ask, BuscaMundo, Dogpile, Excite, Foxnews, Google, Hotbot, Infospace, Live, Lycos, Metacrawler, Metaspy, MSN, Webcrawler, Webfetch, ya.com, Yahoo.
Usually, websites that use HTTPS for legitimate reasons use a signed SSL certificate and a fully qualified domain name for maximum security and a clear identification of the website. In contrast, untrustworthy websites that use HTTPS will use self-signed SSL certificates and an IP address instead of a domain name. Therefore, ufdbGuard can be configured to control access to HTTPS websites using 2 settings:
- enforce-https-with-hostname
- enforce-https-official-certificate
By default, these settings are set to “ON” in the ufdbGuard.conf file. We recommend to keep these settings. In case that a legitimate website uses an IP address in the URL, or an SSL certificate that is not signed by a trusted authority, just add this site to the locally trusted websites.
To keep the database with URLs to be blocked up to date, ufdbGuard has a feature to recognize URLs that are not yet part of the URL database. These URLs are uploaded to be included the next day's URL database.
Src: http://www.urlfilterdb.com/products/overview.html