Parental Control Software

The VTW Guide to Internet Parenting
The Ziff-Davis Parental Guidance and Kid Safety Clearinghouse

Cybersitter: Use at your own risk...

A fatal weakness of all blocking software available today is that the "blacklists" they use are secret, and that errors are hard to find and harder to correct. They block sites that shouldn't be blocked, and they miss hardcore porn sites that should be blocked.

CYBERsitter CEO Brian Milburn claimed that a published article, by revealing words and phrases that were blocked by CYBERsitter, had "devalued their product", and he threatened to seek "felony criminal prosecution" through the FBI CyberSitter CEO Threatens Criminal Prosecution

Cybersitter may be reading your hard drive when you install their software. According to a Wired Magazine article, Solid Oak Software's Cybersitter scans user's hard drives to see if they've visited the Peacefire site. If they have, it aborts its installation. Cybersitter has also been accused of mailbombing a user who wrote them a critical letter.

Useful URL's:
Information about Labeling and Rating Systems page An MIT site with a long list of articles on internet censorship.
MIT Student Association for Freedom of Expression has a search engine which lets you determine whether your site is blocked.
Cyber Patrol: Your Unfriendly Neighborhood Watch and Cyber Patrol: It doesn't work very well, either. In a recent study conducted by Consumer Reports of 22 easy-to-find Web sites that had been judged by investigators to be inappropriate for young children, not one of the four most common software blockers - CyberPatrol, CYBERSitter, Net Nanny, and SurfWatch - blocked all of the sites. Here's Cyber Patrol's search engine to let you find out whether your site is blocked.
Consumer Protection or Censorship Technologies? A Canadian Library Association paper. This paper also refers to the Consumer Reports study.
"Keys to the Kingdom" An EFF report on blocking software.
The Ethical Spectacle has a report on CyberPatrol. One site they had blacklisted is "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratories. FullNude SexActs".

Cybersitter Censors its Critics

From - Thu Jan 23 22:13:27 1997
Path: wn4!worldnet.att.net!newsadm
From: [email protected] (Old Salt)


	NEW YORK CITY, January 19, 1997--In an apparent act of
retaliation against a critic of the company, Solid Oak Sofware
has added The Ethical Spectacle (http://www.spectacle.org) to
the list of Web sites blocked by its Cybersitter software.

	The Ethical Spectacle is a monthly Webzine examining
the intersection of ethics, law and politics
in our society, which recently urged its readers not to
buy Cybersitter because of Solid Oak's unethical behavior.
The Ethical Spectacle is edited by Jonathan Wallace, a New York-
based software executive and attorney who is the co-author,
with Mark Mangan, of Sex, Laws and Cyberspace (Henry Holt, 1996),
a book on Internet censorship.

	"In the book," Wallace said, "we took the position--
naively, I now think--that use of blocking software by parents
was a less restrictive alternative to government censorship.
We never expected that publishers of blocking software would
block sites for their political content alone, as Solid Oak
has done."

	Solid Oak describes its product as blocking sites
which contain obscene and indecent material, hate speech,
and advocacy of violence and illegal behavior. In late 1996,
computer journalists Declan McCullagh ([email protected])
and Brock Meeks ([email protected]) broke the story that
Cybersitter blocked the National Organization for
Women site (http://www.now.org)
along with other political and feminist organizations.
In addition, the product blocked entire domains such as
well.com, maintained by the venerable Well online service.

	McCullagh and Meeks implied that they had received an inner
look at the Cybersitter database of blocked sites from someone
who had reverse engineered the software. Shortly afterwards,
Solid Oak asked the FBI to begin a criminal investigation of
the two journalists and accused college student Bennett Haselton
([email protected]) of being their source.
Though McCullagh, Meeks and Haselton all
denied he was the source (or that anything illegal
had occurred), Solid Oak president Brian Milburn called
Haselton an "aspiring felon" and threatened to add
his Internet service provider to the blocked list if it did
not muzzle Haselton.

 	Haselton came to Milburn's attention by founding Peacefire,
a student organization opposing censorship. On his Web pages
 (http://www.peacefire.org), Haselton posted an essay called
"Where Do We Not Want You to Go Today?" criticizing
Solid Oak. The company promptly added Peacefire to its
blocked list, claiming   that Haselton had reverse
engineered its software, an allegation for which the
company has never produced any evidence.

	"At that point," Wallace said, "I felt Milburn was
acting like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla. I added a
link to the Spectacle top page called 'Don't Buy Cybersitter'
(http://www.spectacle.org/alert/peace.html).
Anyone clicking on the link would see a copy of Bennett's
'Where Do We Not Want You to Go' page with some added
material, including my thoughts on the inappropriateness
of Solid Oak's behavior. I wrote the company, informing
them of my actions and telling them that they
misrepresent their product when they claim it blocks only
indecent material, hate speech and the like."

	Solid Oak has now responded by blocking The
Ethical Spectacle. "I wrote to Milburn and to
Solid Oak technical support demanding an explanation,"
Wallace said. "I pointed out that The Spectacle does not fit
any of their published criteria for blocking a site.
I received mail in return demanding that I cease writing
to them and calling my mail 'harassment'--with a copy
to the postmaster at my ISP."

Wallace continued: "With other critics such as Declan,
Brock and Bennett, Solid Oak has claimed reverse
engineering of its software, in supposed violation
of its shrink-wrapped license. I have never downloaded,
purchased or used Cybersitter, nor had any access to
its database. I believe that Solid Oak's sole reason
for blocking my site is the 'Don't Buy Cybersitter'
page, criticizing the company's bullying behavior."


	The Ethical Spectacle includes the internationally
respected An Auschwitz Alphabet
(http://www.spectacle.org/695/ausch.html), a compilation
of resources pertaining to the Holocaust. "Sixty
percent of the Spectacle's traffic consists of visitors to the
Holocaust materials," Wallace said. "Schoolteachers have
used it in their curricula, it was the subject of a lecture at
a museum in Poland some weeks ago, and every month, I get
letters from schoolchildren thanking me for placing it
online. Now, due to Solid Oak's actions, Cybersitter's
claimed 900,000 users will no longer have access to it."

Solid Oak can be contacted at [email protected],
or care of its president, Brian Milburn ([email protected].)

      -----------------------------------------------
Jonathan Wallace
The Ethical Spectacle http://www.spectacle.org
Co-author, Sex, Laws and Cyberspace http://www.spectacle.org/freespch/