LittleBrother 1.5

Monitoring, analyzing, and controlling yourInternet traffic

Your employers can't legally eavesdrop on your telephone conversations, but they can still snoop into your network access. Kansmen has developedLittleBrother, a software product for the Orwell enthusiast in all of us for peering into our fellow workers' Internet access.

LittleBrother monitors, analyzes, and controls the Internet traffic on yourLAN. It runs under Windows NT or Windows 95, and it doesn't require muchtechnical skill to use. You don't need to reconfigure your network to startmonitoring Internet activity on your LAN; you just need a PC with an Ethernetconnection. The standard edition of LittleBrother lets you view Internettraffic. The professional (Pro) edition provides the same monitoring andreporting features as the standard version plus tools for blocking access tospecific Web sites.

Reports
LittleBrother inspects all the traffic on the LAN and breaks it out intoWeb, FTP, and newsgroup traffic by user, site, protocol, bytes transferred, andcapacity used. This breakdown includes how much bandwidth each application(e.g., Web, FTP, Telnet, mail, news) uses; who uses the most resources, as yousee in Screen 1; and which sites users visit the most, as you see inScreen 2.You can choose from several reporting and viewing options to displaythe results. The software lets you use bar graphs and line charts to summarizethe network traffic. It can also show you the name or IP address of any sitesyour users are accessing, although you can't see what users are doing on thosesites. You can generate reports for Top Talker, Top Site, User Detail, SiteDetail, Daily and Hourly Overview, IP Tables, and an Overview.

The Top Talker report lists usage per user in descending order. The TopSites report lists each site that users access as measured by time or volume.The User Detail and Site Detail reports list the users and the sites theyaccess. The Daily and Hourly reports display each day's and hour's usage. Thesoftware rates usage within these reports as productive, unproductive, neutral,and not rated. You can generate reports showing all the ratings or just some ofthem. These reports give you an overview of how productive or unproductive yourInternet access is each day or hour.

LittleBrother has more than 40 different categories, such as Education,News, TV/Video, and Sex/Porn, which you can edit with the separate site ratingutility that comes with the software. Administrators can provide a rating(Productive, Unproductive, Neutral, or Not Rated) for each category. Each of theratings displayed in the reports has a unique color. Administrators can alsopassword protect site ratings to prevent users from modifying access permissionsor site ratings.

To help identify the users on your network and their configuration, the IPTables report shows the properties, including IP Address, Machine Address,Computer Name, User Name, and LAN Adapter Vendor, for each computer. Finally,the Overview report shows the overall Internet traffic pattern of your LAN. Thefirst section divides all Internet traffic into the four different ratings, andthe second section notes all Internet traffic by the different categories.

Access and Blocking
In addition to providing Internet access monitoring, LittleBrother Pro letsyou build access rules to permit or prevent access to specific Web sites. Youcan specify a site by domain name or IP address, or you can specify a group ofsites by selecting a category.

These access rules are LittleBrother Pro's most powerful feature. Siteblocking is rules-based, so setting and updating access privileges forindividuals or whole groups is easy. You can also enable access privilegesaccording to the time of day. This capability lets you block certain sitescompany-wide, enable certain groups to view select sites, and allow free accessafter work hours or during lunch. The rules are easy to edit, and you can addnew rules as needed.

LittleBrother's Alert feature has editable rules for daytime and nighttimeusage. This feature notifies you when a condition has been met according tovolume or time of use. For example, if an employee has more than five hours ofuse during regular business hours, the software can automatically generate areport and alert you through email. Also, if you want the software to inform youof network traffic during non-business hours, you can establish separaterestrictions to generate alerts for such traffic. One final feature of note isExport Data. It automates exporting the data that LittleBrother generates aseither a .csv or .html file.

Usability
The LittleBrother software interface falls prey to a common defect, a poorlydesigned shortcut bar. Kansmen would have been better off foregoing the shortcutbar and leaving the commands in the menu. For starters, the GUI needs the iconpolice. I suggest Kansmen hire a graphics designer and listen.

The shortcut bar icons look amateurish, as if someone created them inPaintbrush, and the implementation is confusing. For example, the button for TopTalker is a stickman with a halo. But top talkers (users who spend the most timeon the Web) could, in reality, be spending all their time on the Church of SatanWeb site. So the halo doesn't seem intuitive. The Top Site icon is a capital Wwith a halo. Where did the W come from? Only Kansmen knows.

I also found the node filter icon confusing. It looks like a plasticchampagne flute. I think Kansmen was trying to make the icon look like a funnel,but if you are filtering out sites, you don't want to funnel them through.

Despite these inconsistencies, the color-coding and labeling on the bargraphs is intuitive and clean. However, I would prefer to drag and resize theleft frame to better use the real-time information. The Kansmen splash screenappears in the right frame until you generate a report. This display seems likea waste of space. Also, the title bar on the reports needs to better reflect thecontent of the report. For example, both the Top Talker Productive and TopTalker Unproductive report windows have the same title, "Top Talker."

Documentation comes in the form of a 46-page user's guide, which you willprobably never need. Online Help built into the program and from theLittleBrother Web site is available. For tech support, you must contact yourreseller.

Does It Work?
LittleBrother does what it is supposed to do--audit network traffic,generate detailed reports, and block unauthorized access. However, this programwon't solve all your problems. For example, if you want to block user access tosites that LittleBrother categorizes as Sex/Porn, you are creating a lotof work for yourself. Blocking the big name sites such as playboy.com is easy,but hundreds of new sex sites appear every day, and many sites get around IPblocking by changing their IP address regularly. Also, sites with unremarkablefront ends may hide material you want blocked. Browsing every site that appearsas unrated and determining its content can be time consuming.

Kansmen has full-time employees who do nothing but categorize Internetsites. According to the LittleBrother user's guide, the package price includes ayears' worth of category updates, which you can download from the Kansmen Website. The updates are posted every two weeks. Unless the company has moreresources than Yahoo!, it will have a hard time staying on top of the hundredsof Web sites that appear, disappear, and change every hour around the globe.

Although I agree that lost productivity is a problem, the shortage of ITprofessionals is worth mentioning. Many such professionals will view the type ofintrusiveness that this product allows as a signal to dust off their resumes.Keep in mind what LittleBrother could do to morale in your department. Is itworth it? You decide.