Inside Internet Filtering

Greetings from Las Vega and the Consumer Electronics Show 2010.

Today I am excited to announce the latest revision of Safe Eyes, which includes another industry first.  Safe Eyes 6 is able to filter online TV sites on a show by show basis.  This means that you no longer have to block or allow an entire website like Hulu, but instead you can allow specific shows based on the TV rating for that show (TV-G, TV-PG, etc).

We have some other great stuff packed in this release too.  You can learn all about it on the Safe Eyes 6 preview page.

Other enhancements include:

• A new activity-centric interface
• Smarter Activity Reports
• Integrated Safe Search and Search Term Reporting
• Integration with iTunes to block songs and content with explicit lyrics

More on Safe Eyes 6 later.  If you are at CES stop by our booth for a demo (#3128).

Official Press Release for Safe Eyes 6 from InernetSafety.com

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Yesterday Google announced a new locking feature for Safe Search.  Here is a video on how it works:

This is a good step forward from Google.  Due to the implementation, I expect that this will work better for young kids than it will for teens.

The most robust way to control what content your kids can access online is through a parental control software like Safe Eyes. Safe Eyes allows you to control content by category, so even if the search result pops up in Google, your child still won’t be able to get to the site.

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Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com, will be participating in a federal hearing in Washington, D.C. today as part of an all-day meeting by the Online Safety and Technology Working Group established under the auspices of the Federal Trade Commission to promote a safe Internet for children. The topic of the meeting is “Parental Controls, Child Protection Technologies and Content Rating Methods.”

Full Press Release:
http://www.internetsafety.com/press-ceo-speaks-at-federal-hearing.php

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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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David Burt of filteringfacts.org posted a good roundup of the trend over the last few years by filtering software to address social networking.  You can read the full article here:

Filtering Industry Adapts to Social Networking with Monitoring

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Norton is today dropping the “Beta” moniker from their “Online Family” product.  The product appears to now be named OnlineFamily.Norton.  The product will remain free through the end of the year.  While pricing hasn’t been officially set after the free period, the USA Today and PC Magazine both reported it is expected to be $60.

The product seems to have many of the same features as established market products like Safe Eyes, NetNanny, etc.

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Public school students in Tennessee are being blocked from pro-gay websites by the school’s filtering system.  The ACLU has stepped in and threatened to sue while the school system and the filtering vendor stand around pointing fingers at each other for who should be sued.

Educational Networks of America provides the filtered Internet service and contends that the school district sets the policy on what will be filtered.  Jason Callen, ENA attorney said:

The decisions on whether to block certain websites are made solely by the school districts. ENA does not participate in these decisions in any way and is instead simply told which websites to block.

Meanwhile, Oliva H. Brown, the spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools said it is the responsibility of ENA to set the filtering policy:

The vendor is responsible for the interpretation of the CIPA requirements and ensuring compliance.  Under the contract MNPS can request additional sites to be reviewed for blocking or unblocking.

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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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The UK has a voluntary Internet filtering system that has been deployed by ISP’s.  The core of the system is blacklist powered by data from the Internet Watch Foundation.

In the last month or two the ISP filtering system in the UK has been scrutinized over two different filtering mistakes.

The first came when they effective blocked Wikipedia because of an image of on the cover of the Albulm Virgin Killer by the german heavy metal band The Scorpions.  Since the UK system works by filtering all suspect traffic through proxy servers, in this case all traffic to Wikipedia, editing of Wikipedia articles was not available to users in the UK because Wikipedia doesn’t allow proxy connections to edit Wikipedia for security reasons.

Most recently the Wayback Machine was blocked, but it appears to be only limited to one ISP this time.  The Wayback Machine is an archive of Internet sites that allows you to view old versions of websites.  There was a small amount of content in this archive that the Internet Watch Foundation felt should be blocked, but it led to the entire site being blocked by the British ISP Demon Internet.  It appears that the root cause of this block was an incorrectly configured proxy server and the problem was corrected within a few days.

I think these two incidents reflect some of the challenges ahead for Senator Conroy’s plan for country-wide ISP level filtering in Australia.  The Wikipedia incident shows how easy it can be for overblocking to occur. But in the case of the Wayback Machine, the list data from the Internet Watch Foundation seems to have contained only a small subset of the archive.  However a technical error on the part of hte ISP caused a larger issue.  I think we will see similar issues out of Australia if Senator Conroy’s plan becomes a reality.

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Back in June I wrote about the FCC’s plan to create a free wireless broadband network.  Part of the plan required the provider to include Internet filtering to protect children and families.

As expected this has been met with some opposition.  Last week, in an effort to win more votes for his plan, FCC chairman Kevin Martin said in an interview with ars technica that he was dropping the filtering requirement from the plan.

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