It's a general-purpose security product; anti-virus, firewall, parental control and filtering. Here's what Symantec says about it. "This powerful suite includes Norton AntiVirus™, the world's most trusted anti-virus solution, Norton™ Personal Firewall to block hackers' intrusions, and Norton™ Privacy Control to keep personal information private."
I haven't evaluated it from a security point of view, so I can't say anything about how well it works. But in order to do it's job, it sits between your browser and the internet, and blocks whatever it's been told to block.
All of my thumbnailing is done the same way, using "image maps". This isn't Java, Javascript or Active-X. It's just standard HTML. The thumbnails are a single JPG file, rather than 30 separate files (that's a lot faster to load). And then, when you click on the one you want to see, your browser looks at where the mouse is, and requests the corresponding full-size picture.
In the Newsthumbs, NIS2002 can't handle the image maps.
Really old browsers (Netscape 1.1, and the browser that came with AOL 2.0) couldn't handle that. But all browsers for the last six years have been able to handle it just fine. I doubt if there's any browsers in use today that can't handle it.
So I bought a copy of their product, and I found that it just isn't parsing the HTML properly. But I found an incantation of HTML with imagemaps that it can parse, so from Mid-November, the NIS2002 will work OK with the NewsThumbs. Before that time, you'll need to either disable NIS2002 while looking at my site, or else click on the text links, not the thumbnails.
To disable NIS2002, double-click on it's icon, then click on "Disable". Close the NIS2002 panel, then close your browser if it's open, and open it again. Of course, this means that while you have it disabled, it isn't doing anything for you. You can easily enable it again, using the same NIS2002 panel.