If you want to keep inappropriate content from your kids or your employees from wasting time online in the office hours, here are 5 best content filtering tools that can be used by different OS.

1. DansGuardian (Cross Platform, free)

DansGuardian is an award winning Open Source web content filter which currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris. It filters the actual content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, PICS filtering and URL filtering. It does not purely filter based on a banned list of sites like lesser totally commercial filters.

DansGuardian is designed to be completely flexible and allows you to tailor the filtering to your exact needs. It can be as draconian or as unobstructive as you want. The default settings are geared towards what a primary school might want but DansGuardian puts you in control of what you want to block.

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2. K9 (Windows/MAC, Free)

Blue Coat K9 Web Protection is a content filtering solution for home computer with Microsoft Windows and MAC. K9 also divides Internet content into 60 distinct categories which will be stored in the master Blue Coat database. K9 is a desktop solution; you install the software and it checks all the internet requests you make against the filters you have specified. In an effort to overcome the limitations of working from a static database, K9 introduced Dynamic Real-Time Rating to actively access the content of websites and ban them if they fall into the filter categories you’ve selected.

K9 is free for home user, if you need to download this freeware, you should enter your name and email address to request for your home license.

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3. OpenDNS (Cross Platform, Free)

OpenDNS is a perfect solution for people who either lack the time or expertise to set up and administer a full-out content-filtering server. OpenDNS replaces your current DNS server and allows you to filter every connection coming out of your house if you change the DNS settings at the router level. No matter if someone is on your main desktop or connecting into your wireless with laptop, everything will be filtered by OpenDNS. You can set custom filters to white list and black list specific sites and customize the range of filters they provide for you.

Before you use OpenDNS service, you have to make some setting on your TCP/IP or network device for pointing to the DNS of the name server, then register an account to manage your setting inside openDNS.

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4. SquidGuard/Squid (Linux, Free)

SquidGuard is similar to Dansguard in that it is a stand alone filtering tool you connect into with a proxy, in this case the popular Squid proxy. Also like Dansguard, you have a high degree of flexibility—dream up a combination of filtering parameters and there’s a good chance you can make it happen with SquidGuard. No Hello Kitty between the hours of 9AM and 10PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Not a problem with the highly customizable SquidGuard. SquidGuard is natively a UNIX-environment only tool, and you can install it onto Linux, FreeBSD, and so forth.

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5. Hosts File (Cross Platform, Free)

The hosts file is essentially a mini-directory on your computer of IP addresses and what they should be resolved to. If you go into your hosts file, for instance, and make an entry for 127.0.0.1 pointing at www.google.com, every time someone goes to visit google on that computer the web browser will direct them right back to the machine they are sitting at. You can manually edit your hosts file, but many of you use applications like Hostsman to make editing and configuring easier. Editing your hosts file is easy, but its effectiveness is largely limited to how strong the blacklist you’ve downloaded or created is. If your blacklist doesn’t include a site or a string that catches part of the site’s name, it will fail to block it at all.

If you’ve got your own tips, tricks, or even unmentioned tools for filtering internet access, we’d love to hear them in the comments.