Staying Spotless
in a Sea of Slime, Part 7: Tools That Can Help
by Clark L. and Kathryn H. Kidd
Previous columns
in this series have focused on things you can do to prevent evil
influences from creeping into your home via your modem and computer
screen. Most of this emphasis has been on things you can do, such
as establishing rules and situating your computer in a public place.
As you read these columns, you may have caught yourself thinking
"I wish I had an electronic guardian angel that would sit on the
monitor and keep all this bad stuff away." Well, there are some
software products that can help you do this, and that will be the
topic of this column. But we must warn you in advance that nothing
currently available will relieve you of your responsibility of being
involved in the online lives of other family members. Some of these
products will assist you in that task, but none of them will replace
you as the chief guardian.
When selecting
a tool, it is important to consider the ages of the people you want
to protect. It is usually easy to protect young children, because
they do not generally seek out bad material on the Internet. If
they view some bad material, it is probably because they came across
it by accident. With this is mind, you may be able to use existing
tools to provide some measure of protection. Most mailing programs
provide address books, so you can set up an address book containing
the names of those to whom the child is allowed to send email. Most
young children will consider this a convenience, rather than a control.
You will need to remind them that they are only allowed to send
email to those in their address book, but that new entries can be
added if you as a parent add them. Similarly, most web browsers
support lists of favorite web sites, allowing you to build a list
of bookmarks for the sites that you visit regularly. Maintain a
bookmark list for each child, and emphasize that he may only visit
those sites in the bookmark list. Once again, young children will
look upon this more as a convenience than a restriction. There are
a lot of child-friendly sites you can include in these bookmark
lists. Some of them even provide safe search engines that allow
search requests to find only other safe sites.
The real problem
with finding effective protection software is when you're dealing
with older children (or even adults). It's not only the fact that
older children are more aware of what can be done, but they are
also more willing to explore and find new things. This is not to
say they are necessarily looking for bad things, it's just that
sometimes they stumble upon them. Because older children place more
demands on the Internet (particularly as they start to use it as
a research tool for school), they need to have more access, and
that provides more potential for getting into the electronic equivalent
of "bad neighborhoods." Some of the tools we will describe below
may be effective for these older children.
Blocking
Software
Blocking or filtering software is designed to stop access to web
sites that are questionable. There are lists of "bad" sites, and
the software will reject any request to access information from
those sites. Some allow you customize the list of sites so that
you can add or delete your own entries.
The problem
with this design is that new objectionable sites appear on a daily
basis, so the list of prohibited sites must continually be updated.
Some products claim to solve this problem by regularly accessing
their own web site to update the access list with new entries.
Some products
extend protection even further by disallowing access to domain names
that contain vulgar or sexual words. They may also refuse to display
web pages from a site if those pages contain some of the same words.
The problem
with blocking software is that it is often either too good or not
good enough. We have all read stories of someone with blocking software
whose child was still able to access a terrible web site. On the
flip side, we have all heard those stories of students who were
prevented from accessing a legitimate site because it contained
a word on the prohibited list. The software may not distinguish
between a chicken breast that is used in a recipe with the corresponding
part of human anatomy. Also, all of this software is designed so
that someone else has the responsibility of building the list of
excluded sites. People have different tastes and values, and you
can be sure that you will disagree with some of the sites that are
included or excluded.
Most of these
products are designed to block users from offensive sites, but make
no attempt to control access once you are in an approved site. This
may cause problems if you are visiting a legitimate site that has
some objectionable material. Most blocking software would let you
into the popular eBay auction site, even though you can find things
there that conservative parents would not want their children to
see (such as revealing photos of popular entertainers).
Blocking software
is quite controversial. Some groups are trying to get public libraries
to install it, while other groups (including most librarians) are
fighting those requests in the courts as a violation of the first
amendment. Some blocking software has also been found to be far
less effective than advertised, as hackers were able to crack the
software and find that many of the banned sites no longer existed.
When bad reviews of some products started to appear on the Internet,
the makers of those software products promptly added the web sites
containing the critical reviews to their prohibited access lists.
If you want
to review some of the current software products that support blocking,
visit the Yahoo site (www.yahoo.com)
and search for "Blocking and Filtering." This should provide you
with links to some software vendors, as well as to articles that
discuss blocking in general. Meridian Magazine has recommended ContentWatch (www.contentwatch.com) which adds the unique feature of sending you a monthly log of what
sites have been accessed from your computer.
Parental
Controls
We have been members of America Online for years, and we realize
that AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of Internet providers. Yet users
of AOL and other commercial services have some advantages, because
the software used by these services has some access controls built
into it. So you can have the advantages of blocking and filtering
without paying extra.
The features
built into America Online are called Parental Controls, and are
actually pretty good. There are a number of options that allow you
to control such Internet services as email, downloads, chat rooms,
and web browsing. As with other blocking software, you must realize
that you are using a system based upon another person's options
of what is good versus bad. So although you will probably not agree
with all the decisions, at least your children should be protected
from the most offensive stuff. If you find web sites that you want
to add or delete from the prohibited lists, most of these controls
will give you the flexibility of doing that.
Filtered
Providers
Would you rather have a large pipe of dirty water coming into your
house that you filter before you drink, or would you rather the
water be filtered before it is sent down the pipe? This is the option
provided by a filtered access provider, as they do the filtering
on their end, making it unnecessary for you to have a filter installed
on your computer.
Although this
may sound like an ideal situation, it may not work for all users.
Because these providers tend to be smaller than the large services,
they may not provide the same number of local access numbers, or
the required network capacity, or the expected customer support.
Also, you will have the usual problem of someone else making the
decisions about what is good and bad for your family. This may even
be more of a problem with a filtered provider, because it may not
be as easy to override their choices.
Two filtered
providers catering directly to LDS families include the Millennial
Star Network (www.mstar.net)
and LDS.NET (www.lds.net). There
are many other filtered providers that, while not LDS affiliated,
do provide family-oriented content. Some of these can be found by
visiting Yahoo and searching for "Filtered Access." Most of these
providers will offer you a free trial, so you might want to give
them a try if nothing else seems to work for you.
Auditing
Tools
The philosophy behind these products is that you may not be able
to keep people out, but you can at least track where they have been.
Some of the blocking software also provides auditing features, or
there are strictly auditing programs that don't stop any access
but quietly record it. Many times, providing children with the evidence
of their inappropriate actions will be embarrassing enough that
further problems will not occur.
If you know
enough about your web browser, it usually contains built-in tools
that allow you to track web sites visited (History List) and images
displayed (Cache). But keep in mind that devious users may also
know enough to remove the evidences from these sources.
____________
As we said
at the beginning, there is no "magic bullet" that will protect family
members in all cases. If you have installed such software on your
system, we hope you have not taken the attitude that no further
supervision is necessary. These tools will assist you in enforcing
your established rules, but they will not replace you as the primary
protector for those you love.
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Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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