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| Keeping It Clean |
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Plugged In March 2000 • Vol.11 Issue 3 Page(s) 93-94 in print issue |
Keeping It Clean Filtered ISPs Block Objectionable Online Material | ||
 Sam was troubleshooting his computer because it had been crashing lately. Although he had recently installed a bigger hard drive, he found it was full and had no room for a swap file he was trying to save. He finally discovered his 16-year-old son, Bob, had downloaded thousands of pornographic and homosexual images from the Internet. Jane was at the end of her rope. She needed home Internet access for work, but she knew her 15-year-old son, Mitch, was using that account to read about hate groups. She had talked to him about his Internet use and installed blocking software, which seemed to work for a few weeks. She now had indications Mitch was able to bypass the software. She suspected his friend Jimmy had helped. Seventeen-year-old Sally was planning to visit California with her 18-year-old friend Debbie during spring break. They were going to meet two people whom they had become acquainted with in an Internet chat group and who claimed to be University of California students. The girls' parents barely found out about their plans in time to stop them. The Internet is a wonderful resource for kids. Rather than waiting for their parents to drive them to the library, kids can log on to the Internet and almost instantly find any information they need. Many times, this data is more extensive and current than anything they could find in an encyclopedia. However, as the true stories that opened this article show, this boon of information comes with the bane of inappropriate Web sites. The Internet is packed with adult Web sites that contain every imaginable (and unimaginable) type of pornographic image. If you search for a sexually explicit term, you'll find thousands of sites, and many more are added daily. Generally, all the user has to do is click a button saying he or she is older than 18. To make matters worse, pornography isn't the only online enemy. Hate groups have found the Internet to be an easy way to distribute their ideology and materials to interested parties, especially impressionable kids. As if all that weren't enough, parents must also worry about pedophiles and violence. It's enough to make you want to cancel your Internet account.  A Fighting Chance The first line of defense developed for concerned parents were software packages that ran on home computers to block access to inappropriate sites. The dual drawbacks of these packages were that they required parents to be technically literate to be effective and that kids often found ways around these barriers. It wasn't uncommon for one computer-savvy kid at school to figure out how to bypass the software and then to tell everyone else what to do. A newer weapon in the fight against unwanted content is the filtered Internet service provider (ISP). These ISPs block objectionable sites at their servers, before their contents even reach your computer. Many also block chat rooms and restrict other online activities. Because the ISP manages the blocking and filtering, sites can be blocked quickly, parents don't have to be computer experts, and hacking past the protection is almost impossible. To get an idea of how well they work, we spent some time working with two filtered ISPs, MayberryUSA (http://www.mbusa.net) and CleanWeb (http://www.cleanweb.net). Both are national services with local dial-in numbers for much of the country. These services maintain an extensive database of pornographic and other inappropriate Web sites. When users try to access any of the sites in their databases, they block access. If you do find a pornographic Web site the services don't block, they offer a way to report it for quick blocking. While using MayberryUSA, we ran a search engine query for sexually explicit words to find pornographic Web sites. In all instances, MayberryUSA blocked the search so we never saw the results. In addition to keeping a database of inappropriate Web sites, MayberryUSA inspects each universal resource locator (URL, a Web address) your browser requests and blocks any URL that contains a sexually explicit word. This significantly improves its blocking ability. None of the services, however, inspects a Web page's contents as it is being sent to you. For this reason, they cannot automatically block sites just because they contain certain inappropriate words. In the effort to block inappropriate newsgroups, MayberryUSA presently blocks access to Deja.com to keep users from using the service to read inappropriate newsgroups. MayberryUSA is working on a strategy that will let users use Deja.com to access the many useful newsgroups while continuing to block inappropriate ones. Some of the services filter e-mail for spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail), but no filtering is perfect, so you may still receive pornographic or otherwise inappropriate e-mail; a few services also filter profane words from messages. Most of the filtered ISPs lack a parental override option that would let you set up access to certain sites. Although this keeps kids from hacking around such options and into inappropriate sites, a lot of information is restricted. For example, if your kids are doing a high school report about sex education in schools, they will not be able to use the Web to examine arguments on both sides of the issue if the ISP blocks such sites. Because the ISP makes these decisions, you should pick the service whose beliefs mesh with yours. In general, CleanWeb blocks pro-abortion sites and all pro-life sites that contain disturbing material. CleanWeb did not block political or religious sites. iConnect.com (http://www.catholicfamilies.net) focuses on blocking pornography, but it did block the Ku Klux Klan's site. MayberryUSA lets users suggest sites to block to produce a community consensus. The-Word (http://www.the-word.net) blocks sites based on biblical principles, so it blocks sites that promote homosexual lifestyles, for example. During our tests, both Mayberry-USA and CleanWeb blocked a few sites that we thought they shouldn't have, but they were always sites that some parents might reasonably disagree about. MayberryUSA blocks any site with "sex" in the URL, and CleanWeb blocked Columbia University's Go Ask Alice site, which answers kids' questions about topics including sex, drugs, and exercise. That said, we never thought either service was acting as a Big Brother, telling us what to think. A filtered ISP is a great tool for parents who are worried about what their kids see on the Internet. Churches, libraries, and schools that provide Internet access but don't want their computers used to view inappropriate material also may want to look into this option. After all, we know the Internet is awash with information; these services just help you keep it clean. by Ronny Richardson
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