If your children like Boyzone, how do you keep them away from the Boyzone website www.boyzone.com? It might not be the sort of thing you want them to see. A child net-surfing should always be accompanied by a responsible adult. The alternative is to install a "filter" or censorship program that can tell the difference between, say, the US White House www.whitehouse.gov and an invitation to hardcore pornography www.whitehouse.com
You can download a censorship program from a website. And pornography is only the beginning. There is also violence, criminal activity, hate, persecution, drugs, alcohol, gambling and weaponry - all can be blocked by a program called WeBlocker. But for some, even that may not be enough. What about sex education, birth control, abortion, and religion? Or animal rights and militant vegetarianism?
Censorship programs try to solve these problems by blocking any site that falls foul of a list of key words, to which you can add your own. They may also block access to a list of "bad" sites and allow "good" sites. Again, you should be able to add to either list. US civil liberties groups have attacked these for banning legitimate websites, such as the National Organization for Women (for radical lesbianism, apparently) to kids' sports pages ("12-year-old girls"). Self-regulation using Pics, Platform for Internet Content Selection, should avoid this. It is built into some browsers including Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In theory, you can set the level of censorship on a 10-point scale. But so few publishers have rated their sites, it's not worth the effort.
Alternatively, snoop on your kids and confront them later. Most browsers have snooping facilities built in: just check the "history" section for sites visited. Programs such as Kid Control take that idea a lot further, capturing keystrokes so you can look at them later. Kid Control will even store a snapshot of what's on the screen at intervals of 30 seconds to 15 minutes.
Net Nanny 3.1 (Net Nanny Software International, $26.95)
http://www.netnanny.com/
Looking cuddly got Net Nanny off to a good start, and I was impressed when it objected to some of the file names on my PC's hard disk before I even logged on to the net (it didn't say which). But in use it seemed slow to react, and the lists of banned sites included a lot that didn't work anyway (oh irony - to block porn, you provide a list of porn sites). It also seemed a bit rich to blacklist individual email addresses such as liz@ai.mit.edu (Liz Highleyman from MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory) for reasons that were not explained.
Rating 3/10
WeBlocker (We-WebCorp.com, no cost)
www.weblocker.com/
This was the easiest to get working adequately. It lets you select an age range from pre-school to 65+ (handy if your kids are 25-34). It also lets you tick boxes for subjects like drugs, alcohol and gambling. WeBlocker is Draconian: it blocked an educational toy site - The Cabaret Mechanical Theatre (http://www.cabaret.co.uk/), in Covent Garden - for gambling; and it censored drug-related parts of a humour magazine. Still, at least it let the kids read Thresh's Firing Squad www.firingsquad.com/ computer gaming site, for those who are seriously into killing virtual people.
Rating 6/10
KidControl (Tybee Software, $29.95)
http://www.kidcontrol.com/
By being a snoop program rather than censorware, and by avoiding fancy graphics, KidControl has stayed impressively small (817KB). It can hide in the background and keep a log of daily activities on a PC, and can also capture and store screen-shots at pre-set intervals. This is a powerful feature with sites that don't have obvious web addresses like www.xxxhardporn.com Kids can try to evade a keystroke recording system by, for example, copying texts and web addresses from a file and pasting them into the browser, but the visual evidence is incontrovertible.
Rating 6/10
Cybersnoop 3.0 (Pearl Software $49.95)
http://www.pearlsw.com/
This is a powerful program, but it's a hefty download (8,117KB) and not the easiest to set up and use. Cybersnoop keeps an audit trail and activity logs, so you know what people have been up to, and it offers access to three blocking system: RSACi (PICS), SafeSurf and Weburbia. You can put extra websites on an allow list or a block list, and Cybersnoop covers email, chat systems, newsgroups and file transfers, too. The only problem is that you may have to get your kids to show you how to use it . . .
Rating 5/10
Cyberpatrol 4.0 (The Learning Company $29.95, UKP24.95 UK)
http://www.cyberpatrol.com/
This Mac and Windows program is designed to lay down the law in today's wild wild web, and you can even badge a deputy to step in when you're away. The range of blockable topics includes sex education, violence, profanity, and "satanic or cult" (Yee har!). However, it costs money to subscribe to the CyberNOT blacklist, which currently has 161,914 entries. Cyberpatrol is always on duty with a time management section that lets you block net access at different times of day, and it can restrict access to 16 different programs, not just the net. Big brother would love it.
Rating 6/10
America Online (subscription service)
http://www.aol.com
AOL isn't a blocking program, but there's no doubt that its ease of use and "parental controls" feature have helped its popularity. Each account can have up to five "screen names" so kids can have their own private email, chat and internet access. However, the master account can control access to the various facilities just by clicking in the Parental Controls box. There are pre-sets for Kids Only (under 12), Teen (ages 13-15), Young Adult (ages 16-17), and General Access (ages 18 and older), and they can be fine-tuned. It's like training wheels for the net.
Rating 6/10
