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| Access | control software |
| Controlling what young eyes see on the Internet is
probably on the agenda of every teacher and parent.
There are programs which promise to do this, but do
they really work?
A question of censorshipAs in real life, there are good, bad and ugly things on the Internet. While some would like to take a leaf out of Singapore or Chinese governments' agendas and regulate the content of the Net `for the benefit of all', many see such moves as impractical, and as excessive censorship and constraint on free speech. Recent US court decisions, as well as local campaigns, suggest many people prefer to regulate their Internet use at the user end, rather than at the supplier end. The recent inquiry into Internet regulation by the Australian Broadcasting Authority supported the classification of Internet sites so users can be warned of potentially objectionable material online. Known as the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), this scheme puts the onus on content creators to pre-classify their sites in terms of their content and the onus on users to take note. While it can be used for any classification, the aim is for broad age-censorship alerts being embedded in the site. This would trigger an alert or even close down, a new generation of Web browsers and newsreaders that support PICS. The advantage is that free speech is not constrained and users can decide whether or not they want to enable these new codes to guide and perhaps even help supervise Net use by minors. In the meantime, there has been a boom in software to help fill the
gap. How access control software worksThese `Net Nannies' and `CyberSitters' claim to do for minors what anti-virus programs do for your PC: they aim to protect by alerting for unsuitable sites. Indeed, the technology of these Net Watching programs is similar to the way many anti-virus programs operate. Effectively they have their own (hidden) catalogue of taboo sites, words, phrases etc, which are continuously scanned against the Net activity of the user. If an adult-oriented site is deemed unsuitable, its URL and IP address are included in the program's database. When the user logs onto the adult site, the program will bring up a notice stating the resource is forbidden and may even close down the computer at that point. In other cases, the program can be configured to merely track the number of times a dubious site has been logged. A parent or teacher might then use the log as a basis for later counselling and discussion about the issues. None of these would be hard to disable by a determined kid, though.
Most install by loading as a start-up application, with hidden
directories and hidden files. Access to the win.ini or config.sys file
would be all that is required to dismantle these programs. How we testedThis feature reveals our experiences with five programs: CyberPatrol 3.0, Internet Filter, CyberSitter, Net Nanny and Internet Net. None were perfect and we would counsel using them for communication rather than as an alternative to supervision, but CyberPatrol was the best of the bunch. We rated each on their ease of installation, degree of intrusiveness to your system and effectiveness in preventing dubious sites being logged. Our approach was to see how well each responded to:
We also input the IP address (eg, http://205.216.146.201) as well as
their response to the name of the site (eg, http://www.playboy.com). CyberPatrol
CyberPatrol promises Internet access management that allows parents or teachers to manage computer use in their own household or classroom. It controls access from any computer to the Internet. CyberPatrol loads during startup and runs in the background to control access to all associated applications. CyberPatrol lets you block access to possibly offensive and dangerous Internet sites and chat groups. It also can be configured to prevent typing of your credit card information, telephone numbers or other information. It also permits restricting Net access to certain times of the day and limit total access time for each day and each week. CyberPatrol was fully enabled during a seven-day pre-registration period. At the end of the pre-registration period, Internet access is disabled unless you register or uninstall CyberPatrol. We found CyberPatrol installed without fuss and worked well in the background. It scored well by knocking back the adult, race-hatred and hand-made guns sites. Furthermore, it did not knock back the Breast Cancer site. However, the explosive recipes got through. It functioned equally well when only IP addresses were given. Adult newsgroups were also stopped. It can be configured to knock back other sites as required. We found CyberPatrol relatively unintrusive and easy to uninstall via access to a password administration program. Registration includes a six-month subscription of updates to its database. An evaluation version available for download from the CyberPatrol
Web site and from our November PC User Offline CD-ROM. Internet FilterURL: http://www.turnercom.com Internet Filter was easy to install but operated oddly. Instead of blocking sites, it blocked words. For example, it won't permit you to insert (say) 'fetish' in a search engine. If that word comes up in a page, it will be left blank -- as will references to certain body parts. The dictionary in the freeware version was lean with all our sites getting through -- albeit with odd blanks in some portions of the text. Adult newsgroups were stopped, however. The registered versions offer more, but we wouldn't bother. The commercial version of Internet Filter can also log a child's activity on the Internet, letting you rate each listed item to one of three violation levels, and the filter responds to 'violations' by logging and e-mailing you. The evaluation version is available for download from the Internet
Filter Web site or from our November PC User Offline CD-ROM. CyberSitter
CyberSitter installed easily but seemed less effective than CyberPatrol in doing its work. It didn't seem to work properly with our proxy server setup. When we ran it without the proxy server, CyberSitter blocked out the adult and race-hatred newsgroups, however, it let through both of the weapons sites. It seemed to operate a little like Internet Filter though, blanking out any rude words contained in the page. According to an overseas review, CyberSitter was reported as being
stymied by using IP addresses; we found this version blocked both
URLs and IP addresses. Net Nanny 2.1URL: http://www.netnanny.com/netnanny Net Nanny 2.1 is part DOS and part Windows and requires the DOS portion to be installed first, which is quite clumsy. Its automatic installation kept failing because it was rewriting the last line of our multiple boot config.sys file to load a device driver, and to get it to work we had to manually insert it into the config.sys file. Installing the Windows version was fairly straightforward, however, you have to download its starter database from the Web site -- not especially effective. It stopped adult newsgroups and the adult web site, and it failed to stop the race-hate site or the weapons sites. Net Nanny captures text in non-Internet applications, too. For example, if you are writing a letter in your word processor and it contains your address, you can de-activate Net Nanny to prevent your child sending your address all over the Net. Although it could be uninstalled easily in Windows, we found Net
Nanny more intrusive because it affects all applications -- not just
Internet ones -- and it has to be loaded in DOS, taking up 7Kb of
memory. Overall it was also less powerful than the other products. Internet NetFrom: Dataworks (03) 9764 8344 Internet Net is a local product from PC Plus Systems. It promises to control information downloaded from the Internet and protects users from questionable material, as well as offering secure storage for files. One problem is that it forces the creation of another hard drive partition on your computer. There are good reasons why it might want to do this, but it means your CD-ROM's drive device will move a letter (from say, D: to E:), for example. Furthermore, it may not be convenient for everyone to have a special partition on their system just for the Internet. While it installs fine, we found this aspect very intrusive for a home system. It could, however, be an option for a school laboratory, though. A further issue is that you have to develop your own hit list of sites or text to be blocked. Our evaluation version was set rather cheekily to bar all references to 'Microsoft'. We didn't find configuring the program hard, but it was not obvious either. By John Hilvert & Linda Bruce | |||||||
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| Full text ©1996 Australian Consolidated Press |
