Word: cyberpatrol
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...March 15, the Mattel toy company and its subsidiary Microsystems Inc., asked a federal court in Massachusetts to prohibit two young men in Sweden and Canada from explaining to the world how their product, the Web-censorship filter Cyberpatrol, works. The Canadian and Swedish programmers took apart the Cyberpatrol program to figure out how it stored the lists of websites that Cyberpatrol blocks. Cyberpatrol distributes that list in encrypted form, scrambled so that no consumers who purchase the product can tell exactly what the censor they have installed is censoring...
...Microsystems and Mattel all rights in their program, thus allowing it to be suppressed. Mattel is now seeking to have the judge in Massachusetts prohibit--in contempt of the injunction Skala and Jansson agreed to--any website in the world from distributing the information Skala and Jansson developed concerning Cyberpatrol...
...most advanced filters available make it unnecessary to do so. CyberPatrol, a piece of retail software from the same company that manages AOL's Web filters, is a customizable system that allows parents to choose which types of sites to block based on the parents' criteria. I may not want to block my children from information about gay and lesbian politics, but let's say you do: CyberPatrol accommodates. So does Net Nanny...
...tamperproof database--a trail of bread crumbs, as it were--so parents can examine every Web address the computer has visited since the last time Dad checked in. But consider this evidence of the complexity of the privacy issue: Susan Getgood, a vice president of the company that makes CyberPatrol, suggests that monitors have their own problems. "If a preteen is a child of an alcoholic parent," she asks, "and goes to a website that discusses alcohol abuse, and the parent finds out, what happens then...
...librarian in upstate New York, who nevertheless wrote a book called A Practical Guide to Internet Filters. Schneider's book reviews most commercial filters and explains how to make some of them at least serviceable. For instance, she advises that if you must buy a filter, pick one like Cyberpatrol, which allows you to disable "keyword blocking"--a way of getting around the breasts problem that afflicted the grocer. That way, your filter will block access only to a preselected list of offensive sites, rather than banning all the sites containing a suspect word. Of course, what constitutes an offensive...