Inside Internet Filtering

Safe Eyes is among the first parental control products to earn the “Compatible with Windows 7” Logo from Microsoft Corp. The certification ensures that the software is able to block access to objectionable websites for upgraded or new Windows 7 computers utilizing both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Internet Explorer. Most content filters will not filter the 64-bit edition of Microsoft’s browser even if they are successfully installed on a Windows 7 machine, leaving children vulnerable to pornography and other inappropriate content.

The Microsoft “Compatible with Windows 7” logo indicates that a product has passed Microsoft-designed tests for compatibility and reliability with its newest operating system.

64-bit computing is entering the mainstream, and many parents may be buying 64-bit computers without realizing it. Unfortunately, most parental control software is still only 32-bit compatible, so it doesn’t work with the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer. Parents need to choose filtering software that carries the ‘Compatible with Windows 7’ logo to be sure that their filter does the website blocking it’s supposed to do.
—InternetSafety.com CTO Aaron Kenny

If your filtering software does not have the Windows 7 logo and you want to be sure your kids are protected on all browsers, just visit internetsafety.com/switch to take advantage of a special offer.

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One January 5th we announced the pending release of Safe Eyes Mobile for iPhone.  The first Internet filtering application for the iPhone.

The reasons we were unable to make the product available on the 5th was that we were waiting for Apple to complete their internal review of the product.  Yesterday evening we received word from Apple that Safe Eyes Mobile was ready for sale on the iTunes App Store.  This was welcomed news after waiting a little over 2 months for the Apple review process to be completed.

Our site has more information about Safe Eyes Mobile and iPhone Internet Filtering, including a link to the application on the iTunes App Store.

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I am in San Francisco today announcing the latest in our Safe Eyes product line, Safe Eyes Mobile for iPhone.

Safe Eyes Mobile will provide a safe browsing experience for the iPhone and iPod touch platform.  While the iPhone does have some built-in parental controls, these simply turn Safari on or off.  This has the effect of limiting web access completely which is one of the stand out features of the iPhone.  Additionally AT&T’s network based parental controls aren’t compatible with the iPhone.  Safe Eyes mobile provides a middle ground of allowing web access, but filtering it based on content.

Safe Eyes mobile can also protect the iPhone or iPod touch whether it is on the Edge, 3G or a wi-fi network.  Protection on a wi-fi network is one area where a handset based solution like Safe Eyes excels over the network based parental control product deployed by many carriers today.  I feel that the trend of wi-fi enabled phones will only continue to grow.

To learn more about Internet filtering for iPhone visit our site.  We also put together a brief demo of Safe Eyes Mobile for iPhone on YouTube.

The application will be available from the iTunes App Store once Apple has completed thier review.  I will post and update when it becomes available.

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YouTube announced earlier this week that it would further restrict videos containing sexually suggestive content.  They will be stricter about the types of content that causes a video to be flagged for “Over 18″ and also demote the video’s placement on YouTube’s Top Favorites and Most Viewed pages.

This is good news for parents.  The new policy combined with Safe Eyes will make YouTube safer for kids.  Our recently released YouTube filtering feature can restrict the viewing of YouTube’s “Over 18″ clips.  The protection in Safe Eyes is effective even if a child attempts to circumvent YouTube’s voluntary age based system by saying they are over 18 when creating an account.

The content crack down will also extend beyond sexually suggestive videos to include animal abuse, drug abuse, and bomb making.

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ContentWatch recently released a new version of NetNanny, which contains a new social networking feature.  Here is their feature description:

Parents can easily access and view their children’s social networking activities on commonly used sites like Facebook. Reporting provides details about social networking profiles including friends’ lists, pictures, personal descriptions and more. (Source)

I was curious how this worked, and my curiosity was satisfied when PC Magazine did a review of NetNanny 6.0.   (Note: I haven’t personally used NetNanny 6.0, this is all from reading PCMag and NetNanny’s site).

Basically when you attempt to login to Facebook from a computer with NetNanny installed, they force you to install a Facebook application.  Doing so gives them access to your profile data through the Facebook Platform API.  They then retrieve your Facebook profile information and record it in the NetNanny reports which are later reviewed by the person who installed NetNanny (likely a child’s parent).

Having worked with Facebook for an app we created at InternetSafety.com a few things  stuck out to me.  The Facebook Platform Terms of Use state:

1. You can only show information from Facebook Platform to a user if you retrieved it on behalf of that particular user.
2. You can only cache user information for up to 24 hours to assist with performance. The only exceptions are those listed in the Facebook Platform Documentation.

These two terms of service would seem to be in contradiction to what NetNanny does.  It likely exposes information from the Facebook Platform to a user other than the user they retrieved it on behalf of.  I would also imagine that it keeps records of this data for longer than 24 hours.

It is possible that they have arranged a seperate agreement with Facebook for special terms or use.  So what do you think, is this a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use?    Would love to hear your thoughts via comments.

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Neil Rubenking from PC Magazine took a look at CyberParol 7.7 and published his review a few days ago: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2334004,00.asp. CyberPatrol ranked a 4 out of 5.

Other Notable PC Magazine Reviews of Parental Controls:
Safe Eyes 5.0 4/5 Editor’s Choice
NetNanny 5.6 4/5 Editor’s Choice
Webroot Parental Controls 3.5/5

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October, 20, 2008 Crisp Thinking announced the availability of IMSaferPlus.  Available for both PC and Mac, IMSaferPlus sells for $23.95 per year.  However, their website currently lists a “Lifetime” membership for $32.95.

IMSafer monitors Instant Messaging for inappropriate content and reports on information posted on Social Networking profiles.

The plus version includes instant alerts of suspicious IM conversations, a “Reputation Network” to flag dangerous web users, and a deeper level of social network monitoring than the free version of IMSafer.

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A couple months back a customer asked me over lunch “Why can’t you just block the bad videos on YouTube?”  I started into a technical explanation of how difficult filtering video streams is.  Part way through the answer an idea sprang to life.  I could barely wait to get back to the office and pound out a proof of concept.

I’m excited to be able to announce an enhancement to our Safe Eyes parental control software which provides clip-by-clip filtering on YouTube.

Traditionally most Internet filters have either blocked or allowed YouTube as a whole.  Most often it was blocked.  The new filtering capability in Safe Eyes represents the first time an Internet filter has been able to allow or block individual YouTube clips based on their content no matter where they appear online.

YouTube is the third most heavily trafficked website in the world and the fourth in the U.S., after Google, Yahoo and MySpace. Blocking the whole site is unnecessary for families because it means blocking good content along with bad, including perfectly innocent videos making the rounds among friends.  Safe Eyes’ new ability to filter out only the offensive clips solves the problem.
- Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com

The new YouTube filtering is included in the latest version of Safe Eyes and available now at www.safeeyes.com.  Thanks to the entire Safe Eyes team for turning this “lunch table idea” into a reality.

Press Release: Keep YouTube ‘Clean’ for Your Kids with Safe Eyes

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On Monday, September 22nd 2008, McAfee and Secure Computing announced they had signed a definitive merger agreement.  While the deal still needs to obtain the blessing of Secure Computing’s stockholders, it is anticipated that it won’t be a problem.

Secure computing has over 22,000 customers in 160 countries and is the number 1 player in the web security appliance market and the number 2 player in the message security appliance market.  The combination will create one of the largest security companies in the world.

The all cash deal is estimated at about $465 Million and expected to close around the end of Q408.  Through significant cost and revenue synergy, McAfee expects to break even on the investment in 2009, with full cost synergies being realized through 2010 and 2011.

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CyberPatrol today announced a new business-level filtering product called SiteSURV (Press Release).

The product uses a DNS poisoning technique to accomplish the filtering by checking DNS lookups against CyberPatrol’s site database.  While this type of filtering is easy to deploy by simply changing your DNS settings, it is also among the easiest to bypass (I won’t go into details on how).

They have two versions currently: the standard version and a self hosted version for larger organizations (SiteSURV Plus).  The plus version seems to have more customization capability than the standard version, such as choosing your categories, and creating your own list of allowed/blocked sites.  However, with the plus version you also will need to furnish your own windows based server to run the software on.

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