IN BRIEF

IS THE NET BEING CENSORED?

Most software filters use ‘bad lists’ of unsuitable web sites. These are compiled automatically by computers that search for certain words, or manually by teams of people scouring the internet. The filter stops you downloading sites on the list.

But before you leap to install this type of software, ask yourself whether you are happy for a third party to decide what you and your children can see on the internet.

In the US, the American Library Association objects to filters in public libraries because the rules are determined by software manufacturers: ‘Filters are known to block sites with legal information that library users may find helpful for school, job, work, health and other needs.’ A study by US librarians found filters blocked sites needed to answer library users’ questions 35 per cent of the time.

Most of the products we looked at use bad lists compiled in the US, where the companies may be influenced by pressure groups whose views might be considered extreme here. When we attempted to look at UK sites, we found the filters blocked some containing useful or educational material.

Three filters we tried, for instance, blocked access to an advice and information site run by Lancashire Council’s Youth and Community Service because of a small, factual paragraph about safe sex. The filter companies were unapologetic about this. Cyber Patrol, for instance, said the site fell into its sex-education category which ‘includes discussion about the use of the pill and other types of contraceptives’.

Another concern is that software manufacturers block views they dislike – Cybersitter, for instance, denied access to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology site about internet filtering which criticises Cybersitter.

You can’t be sure which sites are blocked, as the companies usually encrypt their lists (although they may publish their criteria for banning sites). Even the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry body that polices UK internet sites, is worried: ‘Common pitfalls include the danger of censorship based on commercial or other interests, and a lack of transparency about what is blocked.

WHY DO WE NEED FILTERS?

Despite these worries, research by the Independent Television Commission found 93 per cent of people in favour of some form of parental control. More people were alarmed by violent or racist sites than pornographic ones.

Offensive sites are easy to find but they can pop up when you least expect them. Some sites purposefully mimic the names of well-known companies – one porn site called itself teen magazine, for instance, to the annoyance of www.teenmag.com, a respectable online magazine for teenagers.

Unscrupulous web sites also use meta-tags – words that summarise the site’s content in order to help search engines – to lure in the unsuspecting. Using meta-tags with no relevance to the site’s content causes people to come across the site unwittingly, even when making innocent searches.

There are four main ways round this problem – filters, browsers, safe search engines and restricted internet service providers. To test them, we tried to access 23 web sites with sexually explicit content, Nazi propa-ganda, bomb-making instructions and so on. We also looked at 17 innocent sites – universities, online magazines and the like – to see whether they were blocked.

SOFTWARE FILTERS

All the seven filters on test allowed access to at least six of the 23 offensive sites we tried to download, even though these sometimes fell foul of the products’ stated blocking criteria – which didn’t always match what we thought was appropriate. We’ve rated the filters on p39.

Most filters work by stopping you downloading sites on their bad list. Some put sites into categories, such as intolerance, violence, or sex, and let you pick which categories to block (we selected them all for our tests).

Another method, used alone or in conjunction with a bad list, is keyword blocking. This checks each site you try to access, and blocks any that include banned words (so it can’t cope with picture-only sites). A few filters recognise self-rating systems (see ‘Browsers and self-rating’), and the final method is to limit access to a ‘good list’ of pre-approved web sites.

The best filters vet newsgroups, chatrooms and e-mail as well as websites. Also useful is the ability to stop children sending personal information, such as their address. The table, below, shows which features the programs have.

They are all password-protected to prevent children turning them off, although we found that some had security loopholes – a determined child could turn them off and still surf the internet.

Although the filters were generally successful at blocking pornography, none blocked the site we tried that contains bomb-making instructions. Only three banned a Nazi propaganda site, and six didn’t block a site promoting the use of Ecstasy.

One reason for this is that even though you can download updates of the bad lists, the companies can’t keep up with new sites. When we told them about our findings, they agreed to add the sites that met their criteria to their bad lists.

They wouldn’t, though, add all of them – gun sites weren’t a priority for most, reflecting their American bias. Cyber Patrol, for instance, told us that the gun sites we accessed didn’t meet its criteria of ‘advocating unlawful use of weapons or listing "how tos"’ – despite the fact that the sites include messages from gun owners about how to use guns.

The difficulty of keeping up to date is one reason why children’s charity NCH Action for Children doesn’t recommend you rely on filters. According to spokesman John Carr, ‘the internet is growing at an exponential rate, and filters aren’t going to be able to provide a guide to the whole net’.

John Carr also criticises filters for being too undiscriminating: ‘Some can’t tell the difference between pictures by Picasso and Playboy.’ We found that the filters contained relatively harmless sites on their bad lists.

Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sentinel and Cybersitter blocked straightforward safe-sex advice, and Cyber Patrol blocked the Aids Education and Research Trust web site. Cybersitter banned technical magazine Wired saying it ‘often has inappropriate content for kids’ – but all we could find were articles about computers.

Two anti-censorship sites were blocked. Cyber Patrol and Cyber Sentinel blocked Peacefire. Cyber Patrol says it tells children how to hack the filters, but it blocks the whole site, not just those pages. We-Blocker stops you downloading the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site.

Some products that look for keywords inappropriately block sites because they can’t understand the context of the words, even though they claim to do so. PureSight didn’t have this problem – it blocked all the pornographic sites we tried to access, but none of the innocent ones.

Cyber Sentinel’s ‘advanced recognition engine’, on the other hand, was less effective. Even on its least restrictive settings, it blocked Lancashire Council’s site, because the words ‘sex’ and ‘live’ appeared next to each other – the site actually talks about people’s sex lives, rather than offering live sex.

BROWSERS AND SELF-RATING

Self-rating systems use pre-set codes that indicate the content’s category (such as violence) and level (injury to a human being, for example) Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, along with some filters, recognise these codes and let you pick the category and level of content to block.

Sites rate themselves to ensure that they attract the internet users they are aimed at, so there are no concerns about third-party censorship. At the moment, though, few sites rate them-selves. Of the 40 we looked at, only two did so – restricting yourself only to rated sites would considerably limit what you see. And blocking everything rated above a certain level would still allow access to all the unrated sites. Another problem is that the system currently works only on web pages – not newsgroups.

INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS

Specialist children’s internet service providers (ISPs) limit kids to preapproved, child-friendly sites. We tried Kidz.Net and Planet Kids, which didn’t allow access to any of our unpleasant sites. But none of the innocent sites we tried were on their approved lists, so the available content might prove limited. These products are likely to be suitable for young children where access to lots of sites isn’t so essential. Of the two, Planet Kids had more content.

FILTERED SEARCHES

Many people’s first point of contact with the net is a search engine. AltaVista, UK Plus and Yahoo! all offer filtered searches for children. You search as normal, but blocked sites don’t appear in the results.

UK Plus Safe-Surf and Yahooligans! use a good list of sites that they check manually. AltaVista Family Filter blocks sites based on key words and phrases. These search engines weren’t 100 per cent effective. On one search, AltaVista came up with 45 sites that we felt were inappropriate for children because of their sexually-explicit nature.

Yahooligans! didn’t return any offensive sites because it is so restrictive – a search for Scooby Doo, for instance, returned ten matches, compared with 7,679 with a standard Yahoo! search. UK Plus Safe-Surf isn’t protected by a password, so isn’t suitable for unsupervised use.

We obtained all these programs over the internet. Some have minimum requirements – often Windows 95 or 98, and a certain processor (or better), memory (Ram) and hard-disc (HD) size. There may be a Mac version.

A time limit option allows you to restrict how long a user can stay online. You may want to log sites that your children have attempted to visit.

They may use bad lists of banned sites, block sites including certain key words or phrases, recognise self-rating codes, or let you restrict access to a good list of vetted sites.

Programs you can customise let you modify good and bad lists and pick categories to block. Personal detail blocking stops names, addresses and credit card numbers being sent over the internet.

You will probably also want the filter to handle chat rooms, newsgroups, and e-mail.