All the Web monitoring tools in the world can't stop . Indeed, as Berni Dwan reports, some of them may even blacklist educational sites. In my youth you never looked for the "dirty" books in the bookcase. If you think that a multi-million-dollar US corporation can restrict and control Irish children's access to the Internet, just make sure that neither they or their friends find Peacefire.org, where they can follow simple instructions to disable the most popular parental control programs. There are always workarounds, and what more creative people to discover them than our children? All the filtering and Web monitoring tools in the world are not going to relegate the wantonness of Cyberia to a lead lined cavern. That's firstly because new wanton shoots sprout every day, and secondly, because the Web is not called a Web for nothing - it is complex, it is intricate, a spider with an international passport.
For me, greater concern should be expended on chat rooms, the live, interactive beasties that can engage an impressionable young mind over time and build a relationship, rather than sites that can momentarily shock or disgust with an obscene or violent image. According to a study from market research company Ispos-Reid, 37 per cent of males aged 12 to 17, and 66 per cent of females aged 12 to 17, have received disturbing comments about sex and their bodies from a person that they have savvy parents and teachers can operate on a level playing field."
The Censorware Project (www.censorware.net) has been examining the effectiveness of Web blocking and monitoring software since 1997. With a hundred million pages already on the Web, and thousands of new domains being added every day, how, they ask, can one group hope to find all, or even most of the material which should be blocked? SurfControl's Cyber Patrol, for example, has over 50,000 entries in its CyberNOT database, and the owners of the blocked sites are not notified of their inclusion in the list. The Censorware Project has examined some of the thousands of sites, which Cyber Patrol blocks in their entirety, against two criteria. Firstly, that blocking should be accurate. Secondly, that blocking should not be over broad.
They have concluded that Cyber Patrol blocks a great many sites which do not deserve to be blocked, and that furthermore, looking at past reports of the product's accuracy, fixing these errors is a low priority. That said, Cyber Patrol does block many nasty sites that you really don't want your kids stumbling upon by accident, and includes ChatGARD, which prevents children from divulging personal information online, like a telephone number or address. If you're not familiar with it, Web blocking and filtering software is not expensive and often even free. Standard features include options to allow parents to override blocked sites, add their own sites to block, specify allowable times to access the Internet, and a detailed logging of all Internet activity and violations.
The makers of Cyber Patrol use a special program called Cyber Spyder, which visits Web sites and creates a report that includes 25 characters before and after each occurrence of a suspect keyword. Unfortunately, 25 characters can't always provide enough information to examine a suspect keyword in the proper context, which has resulted in Cyber Patrol blocking the Envirolink (www.envirolink.com) an animal rights Web site, because Cyber Patrol decided that Envirolink's descriptions of laboratory animal testing was inappropriate for children to read.
CYBERsitter has done battle with Peacefire (www.peacefire.org) the Internet anti-censorship site for teenagers. After criticising CYBERsitter and posting instructions for disabling it, Peacefire found itself on the CYBERsitter banned Web site database. Net Nanny has an impressive feature that screens out known paedophile's personal pages and e-mail addresses. The paedophile blocking material is provided by SOC-UM, a non-profit making organisation dedicated to public awareness of child abuse. Sites blocked include those containing text and/or images presenting paedophilia in any encouraging manner. Rather than just blocking obvious pornographic web sites, many have ventured into the shady area of political censorship as well. For example, the bess program (www.bess.net) has blocked access to hatewatch (www.hatewatch.org), an anti-racist organisation, while i-gear (www.symantec.com) blocked the wisdom fund (www.twf.org), an Islamic non-profit organisation that provides information about Islam while opposing anti-islamic bias in the media. although parental control programs professedly protect children from "many" X-rated sites, they also have the power and resources to support other private agendas by curtailing our access to a lot more than pornography.
There needs to be a quantum leap in the evolution of artificial intelligence before a piece of software can accurately resolve the context of a word within text, let alone interpret sentences. you could start using the advanced features that come with most packages to. For those of us who never had a nanny, we wonder as to the effectiveness of this breed. For those of us who install Net Nanny, should we assume that every other computer in the neighbourhood has it installed too? If responsible people act the way they should, then perhaps we should instil responsible behaviour in our children, rather than resorting to spying on them and curtailing them electronically. Web filtering packages need to be configured for optimal performance and maintained thereafter. While parents might initially possess an evangelical enthusiasm, I can only assume that the zealot is slowly worn down to that of lacklustre participant, as the constant commitment becomes apparent.