[LINK] filtering and related stuff

[David Goldstein]

Justices Weigh Law Barring Virtual Child Pornography
The Supreme Court today heard the government's defense of a recent
federal law that treated "virtual" child pornography —
computer-generated images of children or productions using
young-looking performers who were really adults — as if it were the
real thing. 
 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/31/national/31SCOT.html
 http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47987,00.html

EarthLink plans child-friendly browser
EarthLink said Tuesday that it is teaming with Internet technology
company SurfMonkey on a new browser for children that incorporates
porn filters, a move that takes aim at America Online by seeking to
make its Internet service more attractive to families.
 http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7707956.html

Report on the efficiency of 10 filtering tools.

The NetProtect consortium has publicly released its D.2.2 Report on
currently available COTS filtering tools. This report analyses the
filtering efficiency of 10 "top" solutions on a large database
including 4449 Urls. D2.2 is available for download on
http://www.net-protect.org. 

REVIEW OF CURRENTLY AVAILABLE COTS FILTERING TOOLS
Context of the work 

Started on 1 January 2001, NetProtect is a project partially funded
by the European Commission under the Safer Internet Action Plan. The
objective is to build a European prototype of an Internet access
filtering tool for parents and teachers, able to filter porn websites
expressed in English, French, German, Greek or Spanish. The project
is carried out by a consortium, which is led by EADS Matra Systemes &
Information (France). The consortium groups together Red Educativa
(Spain), Matra Global Netservices (France), Hypertech (Greece) and
Sail Labs (Germany). 

Description of the report 

The report presents the results of the analysis of 50 commercial
filtering solutions currently available to parents and teachers. A
clear distinction has been made between 10 filtering tools and 40
other tools. The first category concerned a selection of 10 of the
most popular filtering tools. This selection includes BizGuard, Cyber
Patrol, CYBERsitter, Cyber Snoop, Internet Watcher 2000, Net Nanny,
Norton Internet Security, Optenet, SurfMonkey and X-Stop. These tools
have been under a thorough review while the other 40 tools have been
under a succinct review. 

The strength of this study is first based on the fact that the "top"
10 tools have been evaluated on a large database, which counted 4449
URLs. Second, 5 European languages have been considered in order to
evaluate the filtering capacity regarding the websites language. The
database was therefore made up of 939 English websites, 866 French
websites, 1000 German websites, 683 Greek websites and 961 Spanish
websites. Third, the set of URLs collected for each language was
divided into two sets of URLs in order to evaluate the filtering
efficiency and the overblocking rate of the tools: harmful URLs and
harmless URLs. Finally, we followed the same procedure to evaluate
each the "top" 10 tools. Our evaluation procedure was based on a list
of 12 criteria (effectiveness, usability, etc.). The evaluation of
each criterium finally gave a final score allowing a ranking of these
tools. 

Cyber Snoop, CYBERsitter and Optenet resulted to be the 3 best tools
of this study according to the 12 criteria used. Nevertheless, their
blocking effectiveness ranged from 46% to 79% while their
overblocking rate ranged from 3% to 25%. 
 http://www.net-protect.org/en/results3.htm

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