Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2011 Download:

There's a reason the Titanium Dashboard is so minimalistic: the program has few features! Parental Controls and Data Theft are the only notable non-automated features included in the application.

The Parental Controls feature is quite good. After selecting the users for whom they want to restrict access, parents can choose to limit their children's Internet access through options spread across four categories. Parents can prevent their children from accessing both forbidden content, as well as questionable technologies (e.g., peer-to-peer file sharing networks). An age drop-down provides a reasonable set of defaults for each category: e.g., teens can access content tagged "Gay/Lesbian" or "Sex Education", but not content tagged "Erotic/Mature" or "Pornography". Parents can even limit the hours their kids can access the network.

Data Theft is an interesting feature that exists in most applications, but is implemented a little different in Trend Micro. Other platforms attempt to secure personal data by raising a red flag whenever anything resembling a credit card or phone number appears to be going over the wire. Titanium Internet Security lets users set certain strings of sensitive information - such as specific telephone numbers, or the last four digits of a credit card - and examines all outgoing traffic streams for those specific substrings. Any attempt to send these strings over the network - in a Web form or an instant message, for example - will be blocked; Trend Micro displays a warning prompt when this happens, and gives users the ability either to grant a one-time exception, or turn off Data Theft protection entirely for up to 30 minutes.

And that's all she wrote in terms of Titanium Internet Security's feature set. A rather poor showing, for a product that retails for $69.95 US.

TIS is perhaps the only Internet Security product we've reviewed this year that doesn't ship with a firewall. The product does contain a feature called "Firewall Booster" that supposedly "enhances" the protection provided by Windows Firewall, but it's not enabled by default. Most of TIS's competitors include their own firewall components, accompanied by a simple control (such as a slider or dropdown) that allows users to adjust the strictness of their firewall.