I am new to the Mac and trying to use the parental controls. Seems to be going OK, but the web logs show a whole mess of ad sites that are a result of my kid surfing just a couple of sites. Do I need to be concerned, or should I run adware blockers?
If you have parental controls setup and working, just open the Safari menu from the top (next to Apple) and click on "Reset Safari". Check off the items you want to reset (clear out) and then choose reset. That will clear the browsing history, cache, and cookies.
Adware (aka spyware and malware) and ads are two different things. Almost every site you visit on the web today will have ads. What you're seeing in the log are the ad servers of the ads that were displayed on the pages visited. You'll never get rid of all of those.
You can run an ad blocker if you want. I haven't except for popup blockers for a long time, so I'm not even aware of the good ones out there.
I use Chrome as there is an extension to block ads on web pages; thereby reducing the risk of accidentally clicking on them... you never know what is behind those links...
I use SafariBlock because I have to run my copy of Safari in 32-bit mode (there's one called Safari Adblock for 64-bit mode), and ClickToFlash. Between these two tools, I don't have a problem with ads (and I should mention that you should "whitelist" ads for sites you want to support, like this one -- its their main source of revenue, they provide a TREMENDOUS free service, and we'd all be sad if they went away!).
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