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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since 2007 the Australian government has been giving away PC-based filters to residents of Australia for free. The new year brought with it an end to this program. The program was terminiated by Senator Conroy about 6 months before it was originally scheduled to terminate.
No government sponsored program is available to replace the NetAlert program as Senator Conroy continues to investigate the possibilities of ISP level filtering. The future of the ISP filtering plan remains uncertain as it faces public opposition and technical hurdles.
In the meantime, parents interested in protecting thier kids online wil have to look to commercial solutions like Safe Eyes.
InternetSafety.com will be exhibiting at CES this year in the Kids@Play Summit area of the expo, booth #72902.
I will also be speaking on the panel “Internet Safety Without the Scare Tatics”. The panel, which is part of the Kids@Play Summit, is at 2:25 on Friday in The Venetian, meeting hall Lando 4203.
Groups of protesters gathered across Australia in protest of Senator Conroy’s ISP level Internet filtering plan. ZDnet Australia has some photos of the Sydney Internet Filtering Protest. The group in Sydney was several hundred people, I haven’t seen any reports from other cities yet.
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:
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.
Senator Conroy’s office has announced that they plan to terminate the free PC-Based Internet Filter program in Australia on December 31st, 2008. Details are on the NetAlert website in the FAQ.
This move is during a time with the furture of the the ISP Filtering program is still unsure. The ISP Filtering program in Australia is being met with resistance from the public and the ISP’s. The live ISP filtering trial hasn’t even begun yet.
I ran across a good blog post that I think talks about the issue with a level head. The point being, why end a program that is providing great protection before you have a replacement in place? There is a poll at the bottom and so far the overwhelming result is to continue the current NetAlert program. You can read the full blog post here: Free PC net filters to be abandoned by the Rudd Government.
Aaron Kenny
As the CTO of InternetSafety.com I have led the design and development of ISP, Consumer, and Business level Internet filtering products. More About Me
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