By MARYANNE MURRAY BUECHNER	E-mail this article to a friend

August 2, 2004

Keeping your children away from   offensive material is tough, but   online filters can help do the job PHOTODISC

I let my son do whatever he wants on the computer. Sometimes I leave him alone at my desk, mouse in hand, while I go off to wash dishes or stop his brother from slapping the cat. Irresponsible? Nah. Conor is almost four, so "whatever he wants" doesn't amount to very much. He can drag and drop Goldilocks into the Three Bears' living room, but if I leave him in noggin.com, that's where he stays. I'm more nervous about him falling off the swivel chair.

Of course, I know that it won't be long before the little guy is off and flying through cyberspace, playing games at sites he types into the browser himself, Googling for help with his homework, e-mailing and instant-messaging friends. I also know that if I give him free and unfettered access, he's bound to run into plenty of inappropriate and disturbing stuff along the way. Online pornography, in particular, has become frighteningly accessible and increasingly hardcore, its purveyors' tactics more deceptive and intrusive than ever. (Heard of SPIM? It's spam delivered through your instant messaging program, and it's often a direct link to smut.) The courts, invoking the First Amendment and a sort of surfer-beware dictum, aren't about to ban it, or make Web operators make it go away.

It's up to parents to protect their kids. The best way to do it? With a Web filter.

The three most popular online services — AOL, MSN and Earthlink — will filter Web content as part of their built-in "parental controls," a set of optional protections that are fairly straightforward and can also be used to restrict online chat and instant messaging.

Another way to go is to buy a stand-alone filtering program. There are at least a dozen on the market; each costs around $35 to $50 and can be downloaded from the manufacturer's website.

When these kinds of programs first emerged for consumers in the mid-to-late 90s, users complained that they went too far (blocking sites about breast cancer, for instance) or not far enough. The main problem, notes Brian Burke, a security software analyst at IDC, was that many programs relied on a master list of URLs-gone-bad, and at the time, the Web was exploding, with thousands of new sites coming online every day, making it impossible for the companies that maintained these databases to keep up.

Today, coverage has greatly improved, and so has accuracy, resulting in fewer false positives, Burke says. CyberSitter ($39.95 at cybersitter.com), for example, screens individual Web pages for key words, phrases and other clues, and does this analysis in real time. It also maintains a list of objectionable sites that somehow manage to slip through the cracks, which it updates every seven days. It's a winning combination: the program passed all my random tests.

Web filters have become a lot more flexible too, allowing users to choose what they want to block from among a laundry list of vices and controversial topics. CyberSitter lists 32 different categories — including some that, admittedly, certain parents will have no problem with, or may even want to encourage their children to visit, like financial sites, sports sites, "tattoo/piercing" and "gay/lesbian topics." Your choices are applied not just to Web browsing, but also instant messaging (except MSN Messenger 6, which is encrypted), e-mail (both incoming and outgoing — more about this later) and newsgroups.

For extra peace of mind, CyberSitter and other programs let you create your own custom list of forbidden sites (a.k.a. black list) as well as a list of sites you'd like to let through no matter what (a.k.a. white list). However liberal or strict you decide to be, it's important to discuss your selections with your kids. You might even strike a deal where you free up a few areas as a reward for good behavior.

If there's only one PC in your household and you've got kids of all ages sharing it, choose a filter that lets you apply different filter settings to different users, such as iProtectYou Pro ($34.95 at softforyou.com). If everybody's been using the same log-in name and password, now would be a good time to set up individual accounts. (This is a snap with Windows XP; from the Start menu, go to Control Panel, then click User Accounts.) The parental controls offered by AOL, MSN and Earthlink can also be set up differently for each user.

As child online safety advocates like to point out, it's not just objectionable material that parents need to worry about, but also online predators. "Kids are being lured a lot," says Monique Nelson, executive vice president of Webwisekids.org. First contact almost invariably happens in a chat room or through instant messaging, so it's a good idea to choose a filtering program that lets you monitor or restrict this kind of correspondence. CyberSitter will record your kid's instant-messaging sessions and email you the transcripts (along with a list of Websites visited that day). To set this up, you'll need to provide an email address and your email service's SMTP server name, which you can get from your ISP. (It should be posted somewhere on the website and will be something like "mail.speakeasy.net," the same thing you need to link your email account to a program like Microsoft Outlook Express).

Dealing with your child's email is another story. CyberSitter, for example, will blank out offending words and phrases from e-mail messages and attachments from within email programs like Outlook and Eudora Mail. But if it detects something really egregious, it blocks the entire message-and every other message coming in after it. The same thing happens with Web-based mail; one racy subject line and everything stops cold. Use a spam filter, not a Web filter, to keep things clean. And as a fallback, insist on having access to your kid's account so you can scan the inbox and outbox for anything weird.

If you're not comfortable spying on your kids — let's face it, that's what this is, whether you're upfront about it or not — some programs let you block instant-messaging completely, or permit messaging only with screen names of people you know (Earthlink calls this the CyberFriends list). Nelson of WebWiseKids.org doesn't recommend an absolute ban, arguing that your kid will simply go to a friend's house and do it.

It is, however, a good idea to block all filesharing. Not only do these services peddle illegal music downloads, they are often chock-full of X-rated images and video clips with misleading file names that will make it past a content filter. If you're worried that your computer-savvy teenager will eventually figure out how to circumvent the filters and blocks you've painstakingly put into place, then choose a program that is password-protected, and keep that password secret.

A final note: Web filters don't work that well if you've got spyware or adware running on your computer. These sneaky little programs typically hitch a ride onto your hard drive from other programs you or your kids download off the Net, and surreptitiously report your Web wanderings to advertisers or serve up their own (potentially inappropriate) ads. It's a good idea to run a clean-up program like Spybot or Ad-aware (experts actually recommend using both, frequently) before you install any new filtering program, to avoid any interference. (You'll want to be rid of the buggers anyway.) If you haven't yet erected a firewall or installed an anti-virus program — two things every online household should have — Symantec's Norton Security 2004 suite offers both of these tools, plus a strong Web filter and spam- and ad-blockers to boot ($69.95 at symantec.com).

Even with all the best technology tools in place, parents still need to talk to their children about their concerns, set some parameters and stay involved in their online activities. Keeping the family PC in a public space — the living room, say, rather than a child's bedroom — is one way to stay connected. Kids should be reminded never to share personal information such as name, age, gender and address without your permission. And encourage them to share their Internet experiences, good or bad. Even the best filters are not flawless, and you'll want to be there when the technology fails.

BOOKMARKS A Web filter can help keep your kids on the straight-and-narrow, but these sites help make sure they're getting the best the Net has to offer them. Here's a collection of both commercial and non-commercial links offering kid-friendly search engines, educational resources and plenty of innocent ways to goof off: Ask Jeeves for Kids The colorful interface doesn't overdo it; home page provides one-click access to a dictionary, thesaurus and other "study tools" by subject. "Fun & Games" includes classics like checkers alongside learning-oriented activities such as "mountain maker, earth shaker," a plate tectonics game Awesome Library This portal has different "doors" for teachers, grade-school kids, teens, parents, librarians and college students, and categorizes links by school subject Berit's Best Sites One thousand sites personally selected by Berit Erickson, a librarian who's been working on this directory since 1994; geared to the 12 and under set DibDabDoo Each of the some two million websites in this search engine's database has been reviewed and deemed safe by an adult; searches are ad-free. Created by a father of four whose filters had failed him Funbrain.com Math Baseball, Grammar Gorilla and other games GuruNet A subscription service that puts a card catalog of information at your child's fingertips. With the program installed, you can "Alt-click" any word that appears anywhere on your screen to pull up the dictionary definition and other data. A trial download is available FirstGov for Kids Provides links to the kid sites about the various branches of government and numerous federal agencies, including the CIA's Homepage for Kids, The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Kids Pages and Understanding Taxes by the IRS KidsClick A Web search directory featuring fields such as Weird & Mysterious (subcategories include ghosts, monsters and aliens) and Popular Entertainments (rock music, cartoons) as well as Religion and Geography. Click to view the home page "through a Librarian's Eyes" and the search categories convert into Dewey Decimal numbers. Picture Search Tools link at the top of the home page pulls up a list of image databases by subject: arts, astronomy/space, animals or history/society Kidspace at the Internet Public Library A comprehensive, well-organized portal featuring general references (almanacs, encyclopedias, etc.) and general category links; find cool experiments under Math & Science or poetry through the Reading Zone Lawrence Hall of Science This site's Play page lists dozens of math and science-oriented games and activities, plus ideas for projects you can do at home Destination Modern Art A brand new site that invites kids ages 5 to 8 to explore art (including Van Gogh's Starry Night) through image and sound. Flash 6, an animation plug-in application, is required, but it takes seconds to download CyberPatrol's Cyberguide A search engine run by SurfControl, a leading vendor of Web filtering and other types of security software Yahooligans Yahoo's own kiddie corner. Searches for "marijuana" and "sex" did produce results, but links were factual and clean-cut

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