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.
Australian news sources are reporting that the ACMA Blacklist (the sites that Senator Conroy wants to ban as part of his nationwide filtering plan) has been posted to the Internet. The particular version in question is supposed to be from August 08
ACMA release a statement saying:
ACMA has previously investigated and taken action on material—including child pornography and child sexual abuse images—at some of the sites on this list of 2300 URLs. However, the list provided to ACMA differs markedly in length and format to the ACMA blacklist. The ACMA blacklist has at no stage been 2300 URLs in length and at August 2008 consisted of 1061 URLs. It is therefore completely inaccurate to say that the list of 2300 URLs constitutes an ACMA blacklist
It will be interesting to see what impact this has on the nationwide filtering plan in Australia.
Live trials of ISP level internet filtering are moving forward in Australia. The six ISPs that will conduct live trials are: Primus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. Noticably missing are Australias largest ISPs Optus and Telstra, although Telstra decided not to participate.
Customers at these ISP’s will have the option to be included or not be included in the filtering trials. Two different trials will be run: one that blocks ACMA blacklisted URLs, and one that filters additional inappropriate content.
Don’t expect results anytime soon though. Primus is on record stating that they won’t begin the trial until April and will likely complete the trial in June.
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.
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.
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.
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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