
The paedophile blocking material is provided by SOC-UM, a non-profit making organisation dedicated to public awareness of child abuse. Net Nanny has an impressive feature that screens out known paedophile's personal pages and e-mail addresses.

After criticising CYBERsitter and posting instructions for disabling it, Peacefire found itself on the CYBERsitter banned Web site database. Unfortunately, 25 characters can't always provide enough information to examine a suspect keyword in the proper context, which has resulted in Cyber Patrol blocking the Envirolink (an animal rights Web site, because Cyber Patrol decided that Envirolink's descriptions of laboratory animal testing was inappropriate for children to read.ĬYBERsitter has done battle with Peacefire (the Internet anti-censorship site for teenagers. The makers of Cyber Patrol use a special program called Cyber Spyder, which visits Web sites and creates a report that includes 25 characters before and after each occurrence of a suspect keyword. Standard features include options to allow parents to override blocked sites, add their own sites to block, specify allowable times to access the Internet, and a detailed logging of all Internet activity and violations.
Net nanny app store software#
If you're not familiar with it, Web blocking and filtering software is not expensive and often even free.

That said, Cyber Patrol does block many nasty sites that you really don't want your kids stumbling upon by accident, and includes ChatGARD, which prevents children from divulging personal information online, like a telephone number or address. They have concluded that Cyber Patrol blocks a great many sites which do not deserve to be blocked, and that furthermore, looking at past reports of the product's accuracy, fixing these errors is a low priority. Secondly, that blocking should not be over broad. Firstly, that blocking should be accurate. The Censorware Project has examined some of the thousands of sites, which Cyber Patrol blocks in their entirety, against two criteria. With a hundred million pages already on the Web, and thousands of new domains being added every day, how, they ask, can one group hope to find all, or even most of the material which should be blocked? SurfControl's Cyber Patrol, for example, has over 50,000 entries in its CyberNOT database, and the owners of the blocked sites are not notified of their inclusion in the list. The Censorware Project (has been examining the effectiveness of Web blocking and monitoring software since 1997. According to a study from market research company Ispos-Reid, 37 per cent of males aged 12 to 17, and 66 per cent of females aged 12 to 17, have received disturbing comments about sex and their bodies from a person that they have savvy parents and teachers can operate on a level playing field." That's firstly because new wanton shoots sprout every day, and secondly, because the Web is not called a Web for nothing - it is complex, it is intricate, a spider with an international passport.įor me, greater concern should be expended on chat rooms, the live, interactive beasties that can engage an impressionable young mind over time and build a relationship, rather than sites that can momentarily shock or disgust with an obscene or violent image. There are always workarounds, and what more creative people to discover them than our children? All the filtering and Web monitoring tools in the world are not going to relegate the wantonness of Cyberia to a lead lined cavern. If you think that a multi-million-dollar US corporation can restrict and control Irish children's access to the Internet, just make sure that neither they or their friends find, where they can follow simple instructions to disable the most popular parental control programs. In my youth you never looked for the "dirty" books in the bookcase.

Indeed, as Berni Dwan reports, some of them may even blacklist educational sites. All the Web monitoring tools in the world can't stop.
