Internet Content Filtering

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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If you’re a parent, chances are you’re concerned about the content your kids are being exposed to on television. According to a March 2005 poll by Time Magazine, 66 percent of respondents said there is too much violence on TV, 58 percent said there is too much cursing, and 50 percent said there is too much sexual content. Although that’s the perception of adults, it’s based in fact.



According to the Parents Television Council, profanity is used once every six minutes on network TV shows, once every two minutes on premium cable shows, and once every three minutes in major motion pictures. Alarmingly, according to January 2005 Nielsen statistics, Desperate Housewives is the most popular network television show among children aged 9 to 12. Unless you’re willing to be the TV guardian in your house, how can you be the TV filter that ensures your home remains curse free?



Fortunately, new technology gives you the power to remove the cursing and offensive language that is coming into your home through television and video. There are devices available that can ensure your home has a curse free TV, and that when they watch TV, kids won’t be exposed to the profanity that flies in the face of everything you believe in.



Typically, these TVguardians connect between your TV and VCR, cable, satellite receiver, or DVD. After an easy installation that takes about five minutes, the device automatically detects and filters out about 95 percent of all offensive words and phrases on TV programs and videos, giving you “cursefreeTV.”



With these devices, you no longer have to be the TV guardian in your house. Instead, the device reads the hidden TV signals for closed captions, detects offensive language, momentarily mutes the sound, and displays acceptable words and phrases. In other words, you don’t have to turn off the TV or video so won’t miss a thing.



Some of these models include a feature that allows you to block out offenses to the name of God and Jesus Christ on one setting, while leaving in the name of God when you are watching religious programming.



With a device like this, a generation of TVkids can be protected from foul language, and you can watch a larger selection of programs, without being concerned that profanity will interrupt your enjoyment.



About the author:

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Visit this Family and Children Website and Majon’s Family and Children directory.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The Misconceptions of Spam Filters
by Laurie Rogers Copyright July 2002

Unfortunately there are a lot of people online that all have
many misconceptions regarding Spam Filters. Today I’m
going to answer some questions that people have asked
me about my “Spam column” for DEMC Small Business
Ezine regarding them. With regards to spam filters, one
can never have enough knowledge, so I do hope that this
article will clear up any misconceptions that you may have.

1. Don’t spam filters ONLY apply to those who have NOT
opted in?

This is indeed a very sad misconception, Spam Filters do
affect EVERYONE who sends and receives email in some
way or another. Whether you publish a FREE ezine OR a
PAID ezine, it does not matter, if it is being sent by email
it affects YOU. The biggest problem with filters is that they
have NO way to detect that the email message is in fact
“Optin”, they actually base it on your headers.

Should you use a third party list server, your chances of
being filtered are even greater, because of that reason.
And this is how ALL filtering is based: By looking at the
headers in your email message, by using a point system
based on the contents in your subject line as well as the
body.

This can also be done by subscribing to a blacklist service
that will provide them with a list of domains or hosts that
have been identified as being used by spammers -such as
http://www.spamhaus.org or http://mail-abuse.org/ AOL,
Verizon and Accessus are widely known for using services
such as these. It should also be known that spam filtering
programs MAY also subscribe to these services, some do
and some do not.

2. I heard that spam filters don’t apply to autoresponders,
is this true?

Actually they do, because if you send email using a third
party list server, and put your FROM email address in the
field rather than a FROM address on the third party’s list
server - the spam filter will read it as being a “falsified”
email address or header. Because REAL spammers do
it all of the time.

3. Spam Filters do not target HTML ezines because they
can’t read the code properly, is this true?

Yes in fact they do, some more so than text ezines, this is
because HTML ezines are considered to be more virus
prone. And NOT all list servers and email clients “clean”
their email before it is sent. Meaning, even if you do not
have a virus on your computer, your ezine can still pick
one up during the process of sending through your list
server. This has been known to happen on “high traffic”
list servers as well as FREE list servers, such as Yahoo
Groups.

3. Aren’t spam filters ONLY used by large ISP’s?

Although it is very true that the majority of larger ISP’s use
Spam Filters (such as: AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Mindspring,
Verizon, Accessus, Sympatico etc.) you will find a lot of
smaller ISP’s use them as well. For instance, my ISP has
only 900 customers and they do use them, although I’ve
made it quite clear they are unacceptable on my account.
The most “popular program’ that ISP’s use is called Spam
Assassin.

I hope this article has cleared up any misconceptions that
you may have had regarding Spam Filters. You can learn
more detailed information about Spam filters by visiting:
http://spamassassin.org ests.html

Article by Laurie Rogers Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

About the Author

Laurie Rogers is co-author of the Ezine Resource Guide, you
can check it out at: http://www.zineadz.com/erg.html She
is the owner of Optin Frenzy a list building program for ezine
publishers http://www.optinfrenzy.com You can also obtain
Laurie’s articles at: mailto:ezinearticles@optinfrenzy.com

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The Internet is a great tool for many things, such as doing research, reading the latest news, shopping and staying in touch with family and friends. To borrow from the title of a Clint Eastwood movie, along with the good comes “the bad and the ugly”.

Freedom on the Internet also opens the door for illegal activity, such as emails pretending to be your bank (aka phishing), expression of various ideas - whether you agree with them or not, scams to separate people from their money and content that some find objectionable, like pornography.

While searching the Internet for homeschool support groups, to ask for permission to list their web site as a resource in HomeSchoolEXPOs’ Support Groups & Organizations directory, I became a victim of porn-napping. I didn’t know this term existed until I decided to do research for this newsletter. My purpose was to help other parents, who are short on time, learn about what they can do to protect their children who use the Internet.

Porn-napping happens when a non-pornography domain or web site address becomes inactive and it is purchased by a pornography business. The site might have closed down or the owner didn’t renew their ownership. Once the pornography business owns the address, they post their content on it. Below is an example of how I was porn-napped.

Let’s say there is a homeschool support group called Family Homeschooling. Their web site address is www.familyhomeschooling.com. The group discontinues because all of the children have graduated high school and have gone to college. The parents decide not to renew the ownership of their website address. A pornography business discovers the support groups’ web address is available and decides to buy it. Now that they own the address, they post their content under the domain www.familyhomeschooling.com, with no warning of the content that is coming. Another tactic they may employ is something called a re-direct. This happens when you click on or type in a web site address they have purchased, e.g. www.familyhomeschooling.com, and you are re-directed to another site with their content. Re-directing is not illegal. Many web sites use this feature for functions such as load balancing or redirecting users to a sites new web address because it has changed.

My original plan was to write an article about the steps that parents can to protect their children from pornography and pedophiles. While looking for information, I found a couple of good articles and resources that provide great information for parents. Instead of recreating the wheel, I’m providing the following links for parents to learn more about what they can do to protect their kids when their kids are online.

1. 2005 Software Review of Parental Control and Internet Filtering Software
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/?ttreng=1&ttrkey=internet+filter

2. Home Internet Filters - Steps Parents Can Take At Home For Filtering Content
http://www.northstar.k12.ak.us/safety/filters.html

3. Parental Control and Internet Child Safety
http://www.protectkids.org/

4. Wired Kids - Online Safety Project for Kids and Teens
http://www.wiredkids.org/

5. NetSmartz Workshop - Interactive games and activities to teach kids what to watch for online to protect themselves.
http://www.netsmartz.org/

6. Parents Can Make Internet Safer for Kids - Article in the Honolulu Advertiser
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Oct/19/tc/tc08p.html

7. SafeKids - Making Technology and the Internet safe for Families
http://www.safekids.com/

8. GetNetWize - The GetNetWise coalition wants Internet users to be only “one click away” from the resources they need to make informed decisions about their family’s use of the Internet.
http://kids.getnetwise.org/

About the Author

Aaron Hyde is a consultant with the 280Group, http://www.280group.com, with over 17 years of industry experience. He homeschools and is the founder of HomeSchoolExpo, http://www.homeschoolexpo.com. HomeSchoolExpo is a new auction site for connecting homeschoolers who want to buy and sell homeschooling books and resources. HomeSchoolExpo also provides store hosting for family friendly businesses.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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How many times have you realized that your email simply doesn’t arrive to your list or you suspect something is going wrong because you don’t get the response you are waiting for?, this is more common today than yesterday and will be critical tomorrow.

It’s frustrating for us that our Content is not deliver to the end-user, this is true for you and all the people dependable on email technology, the results plainly don’t come, whatever they can be.

Have you seen those funny email arriving to your email container with odd characters that some times seem like the sender is telling you rude words? Don’t take it literally, is an effort from the advertisers to deliver their best proposition trying to bypass the filters… some of them will arrive, some of them are taken out from you and put inside the waste container of your ISP.

Is there some hope for the small entrepreneur in this jungle of spam filters, viruses, and junk information?

Deliver Quality Content To End-user And Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters: RSS Gives you the Chance To Deliver messages To End-user

It’s A Fact: At present this is the best way to beat spam filters, RSS is the fresh road to walk, getting rid of the problems that nowadays attack the email option, this allows you to send your messages to the users with 100% sureness they will arrive, we don’t know if RSS is the email killer, its too early to state and coin this phrase, anyway some gurus say its here to bury email, some others think is only an alternative way to keep in contact with the end-user … the only true is: You can deliver your messages spam free.

But its not costless, you need to work, and work constantly and with quality, if any of these variables fail, all your efforts go to the drainage piping. Why? If the end-user are no more interested in your content he/she can kiss you good bye easily with a finger, the small one on the delete key.

RSS is The Secret Weapon To Deliver Quality Content

RSS gives the power to the end-user, this means marketers must be concerned with the content they deliver, for most of the sellers this is a hard alternative, but at the end the online world will see a lot of websites full of worthy content, the users will come again and again, and if this happen to you, your days will be longer and profitable.

Deliver quality content is the advertisers and webmasters payment, this is not negative, Search Engines go in the same direction, if you want a good SE position it most be due to your content, content tends to be the only parameter in the near future. Make your homework and you’ll see positive results in short time. If this not convince you, remember, email is living the hard way and if things go in the same direction it will go out of sight, at least like a marketing alternative.

What all this means for the end-user?

The end user just now is the winner, he/she has the control, are able to access any kind of information in accordance to his/her interest: news, marketing options, leisure sites, knowledge pages, new content is notified automatically, can subscribe/unsubscribe with total freedom, no more need to travel to the websites and waste time looking for something new….

About the Author

C Zarza
20+ experience in the information technology world,
He has built financial system for several years
Background: Databases, Web , Finances …
czarzac@gmail.com
http://www.nesswords.com