Internet Content Filtering

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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So What Makes a Good Spam Filter Anyway?
By Alan Hearnshaw

Spam Filters. Most of us know we need one. Some of know we need a better one, but how many stop to think what actually makes a good spam filter in the first place?

This is not just a rhetorical question. It is a question that many users and many developers - do not ask, and consequently, goes unanswered.

Maybe this could be better answered by defining here the qualities of the perfect spam filter. We ll call our perfect spam filter the SpamSplatter 3000 . Here are some of the defining qualities of SpamSplatter 3000

1. It requires zero interaction from the user.
2. It produces zero false positives (good messages identified as bad) and zero false negatives (bad messages identified as good).
3. It is transparent that is, you only ever see good messages and never need even be aware that spam exists.

That s it. Not much of a shopping list is it?
Of course, SpamSplatter 3000 hasn t been invented yet (and if it does, I want a piece of the action), but it does give us a frame of reference when looking for the best filter we can find.

Let s take each point in turn:

It requires zero interaction from the user
There are two kinds of filters that come near to this ideal currently: Bayesian Filters and Community Filters.
Bayesian filters strip messages down to small word bites , or tokens and maintain a database containing lists of good and bad tokens. When a new message is encountered, the filter strips this message down to tokens, compares it to the database, and applies a formula based on the British scientist Alan Bayes formula for probability calculation.
Over time, the Bayesian filter learns the characteristics of spam messages.

Community Filters simply work on a voting system whereby every user that receives a spam message votes it as spam. This information is stored on a central server and when enough votes are received the message is banned from all users in the community.

As can be seen, the user interaction from these types of filters is mainly limited to two button operation correcting wrongly identified messages and the more accurate the filter, the less those buttons are used.

OK, so that s pretty good. Not exactly zero interaction, but if the filter is accurate enough, then it should be pretty near. That brings us to point two:

It produces zero false positives or negatives
This is the area in which most spam filter development is concentrating and things are getting pretty good nowadays. It is not at all unusual to see an efficient modern filter achieve accuracy of 96% or better. It is, of course, far better to have a false negative than a false positive if you are ever going to tear yourself away from the killed mail folder!

Of course, by definition, community filters cannot reach 100% accuracy as someone has to be getting the spam to be voting it as such!
Theoretically, a Bayesian filter may be able to eventually get quite close to 100% accuracy, so at least there is hope there.
Content based filters (those that look for certain words, phrases or other indicators in a message to identify it as spam), will almost certainly not get much higher accuracy figures than the best of them can achieve today. Adapting to changing spam requires new filters to be created on an ongoing basis.

And finally, we come to the holy grail of spam filtering:

It is transparent
Strangely enough, not enough work seems to be done in trying to achieve this goal. Some of the best filters on the market today identify spam with impressive accuracy and then simply place them in a killed mail folder for your later perusal.
Now, forgive me if I m missing something here, but isn t the point to save you having to wade through the junk mail? Isn t that what you bought the filter for? With the SpamSplatter 3000 , you don t need to do that.

As we haven t achieved 100% accuracy yet (and probably never will), the only way to free us from checking the killed mail folder is a challenge/response system. This is where a message is automatically sent back to the sender requiring them to take some action for their message to actually be delivered.

Some systems tend to go overboard with the challenge/response system. These systems - often called Whitelist systems - block messages from anyone that isn t in the user s friends list. Guaranteed 100% effective, but too drastic a measure for most users.

Now, it seems that the most intelligent use of this system would be to send challenges only to messages that were flagged as questionable . Good message can be delivered, definite spam can be deleted and questionable ones would earn themselves a challenge message.

So, to sum up, let s rewrite the qualities of our perfect filter and get a shopping list of what to look for while we wait for the SpamSplatter 3000 to arrive:

1. Simple, minimal setup and maintenance.
2. Extremely low rate of false positives and as few false negatives as possible.
3. A transparent fail-safe mechanism whereby the victims of those false positives can force the message through to you.

It s simple really. Now, who s going to build me this SpamSplatter 3000 ?

Alan Hearnshaw is the owner of http://www.WhichSpamFilter.com, a site which provides weekly in-depth spam filter reviews, user help and guidance and a community forum.
alan@whichspamfilter.com

About the Author

Alan Hearnshaw is a computer programmer and the owner of http://www.WhichSpamFilter.com, a site which provides weekly in-depth spam filter reviews, user help and guidance and a community forum.

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

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You spent tireless hours creating your business model, even longer perfecting your website to be the best that it can be. Taking count of your competitors, positioning yourself with a uniqueness that surely could not see you fail.

You agonized for weeks over the perfect website hosting company for your business, and chose the one that guaranteed you 99% uptime (you want your website ‘up’!). You have staff in place, or indeed if working alone, know that you will be your own ‘one-woman’ customer support team.

You have made an executive decision, through the hundreds of business meetings that you have had with yourself (in your own head - whilst falling asleep, in the bath and eating lunch) that you will be providing email sales and email customer support only. After all, if it is good enough for eBay then it is good enough for you yes.

Everything is in place, the site is live, the search engine marketing firm has been contracted for $39.95 a month (you don’t have much of a budget just yet), the advertising is in place and you have decided to do this yourself to save extra money (after all you summarize, why hire a company to look after PPC when you can easily do it yourself right).

It’s Monday, the perfect ‘go-live’ day, 1500 hours and the site has been live 8 hours, your pride and joy is up and running and your dream of making an online business a reality is now yours. You are getting visitors and hey, you are even starting to get sales and it’s all looking good.

You have employed some of the best anti spam/junk mail filter software there is to avoid unwanted distractions whilst you respond to your new customers and your website hosting company also guarantees you the most vigorous defence at server level for unwanted email.

But…suddenly there is a problem, you start receiving emails complaining that you have not replied to other emails, which you had never received. At first you simply thought it was a ‘crazy’ customer or one of those lost emails that never get there that you know the traditional postal service are so well known for.

But….then there are 2 emails complaining of non-response, one from a customer who had bought from you the previous day demanding that if you do not respond immediately that they will charge-back the transaction! Where did that come from, you never received an email but you did receive this email - why was that, this really is coming more of a regular occurrence and something that you need to take action in resolving.

Now, not only are you losing sales by not receiving emails of a pre-sales nature but you are receiving emails from your customers complaining that once they buy from you that you cannot be contacted.

And so it starts, the beginning of the end, a bad reputation for customer support, charged-back transactions that cost you and your now struggling website business additional money and a realization that there seems to be a problem with email, but you do not know what it is.

Ok, so the above might seem a little extreme but we live in an extreme world where just one issue can make or break a company and as a small ‘one-woman’ online business who has spent so much money on search engine marketing, advertising and making your website the best that it can be, you really could do without such issues. You want to be a success, not gain a reputation as one whom provides terrible service.

Where do you look to resolve the issue?

No further than the spam/junk mail filter software you purchased and/or the service mail filters that your website hosting company put in place ‘for your protection’.

The very purpose for which spam/junk mail filters are implemented, being to protect your mailbox from unwanted email, can be the very same good intentions that cause you great issues with your customers and cause annoyance to distraction in resolution.

What is an unwanted email; yes the hundreds of spam emails selling the latest pharmaceutical product from yet another untrained and un-web-educated affiliate. Emails that you never asked for or indeed want - they are so annoying that you ensured that your home PC, which is also used by your 2 kids (12 and 15 years of age) employs the same level of spam email protection as your business PC. You didn’t want your kids to become privy to ‘adult’ spam themed emails that pop through every mail box from uncaring spammers across the world did you.

But wait, this is your business computer and your business website we are talking about now, not your home PC where spam and junk email filters are best put to use. Your business uses email as its main communication tool, is it really a wise idea to put your faith in a piece of software or your website hosting companies default mail filters. Should you not really take on the ownership of deciding what is and what is not junk email, and the question to really ask oneself is, can your website business really afford to put the decision of what should and what should not arrive in your email box.

Regardless of how ‘intelligent’ the spam filter is, how much control you have over it, or indeed how much control you do not have over it if a default feature of your website hosting email accounts, any website business worth its salt needs at the very least to consider all of the factors that make up this fundamental business decision - to filter, or not to filter.

Have you run all appropriate tests? Can you receive emails from Hotmail, Yahoo and other free web accounts? What happens if an attachment comes with the email, and are there any kind of content filters or ‘auto-responder’ issues to think about. What about the different ISP’s, can you receive from AOL users - or more importantly sometimes, can AOL users receive your emails.

Explore the next set of issues, perhaps you can receive all emails, but what happens if your customer is using s spam/junk email filter and they cannot receive your reply. The nightmare scenario then of you actually responding to your customers contact emails but because of their ISP or junk mail filter they cannot receive your replies, have you tested this, have you tested the content of your emails? If you lace HTML or URL’s within the content is that accepted…yes these are all issues that you should have considered before your website even went live but this is not a well documented or well discussed topic.

Yet, this should a subject of conversation, it should be a topic of interest and it certainly should be something that is addressed as part of every website implementation plan.

Do not let a spam or junk email filter ruin your business. Get it setup properly, with thorough implementation and gain knowledge of how to operate it correctly. Don’t let technology take over by simply selecting the ‘default’ option.

NOTE: Not all website hosting companies implement anti-spam filters by default. If in doubt, ask. This article does not assume that spam/junk email filters will ruin a business, only that the business in question should be thoroughly knowledgeable of any issues when running such software - and where implementation and spam control is available that these are properly set up.
About the Author

Suzzi Law is the quality and control marketing arm of www.servicewrap.net, with many years experience in undertaking search engine ranking services for hundreds of companies worldwide - without real visitors it will not matter if you have email communication issues.

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

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The unsolicited junk or bulk email that you receive is known as Spam. Spam is a very serious problem the people have to deal with daily. Sometimes the junk emails exceed the regular email messages that we receive in our email account. Spam filter can be a solution for you to get freedom from Spam mails. There are different types of software to keep out the Spam emails from your inbox. Spam filters can monitor the emails that come in your inbox and prevent any Spam mail from entering in to your inbox.

The Spam email that you receive is due to the inappropriate usage of mailing list. The mailing list consists of email ids of different people and all of them can be flooded with bulk or junk emails. Many companies send out the Spam email massages to a large number of people who do not ask for such massages. Spamming is considered to be very bad netiquette as it amounts in violating a person’s privacy. Netiquette demand that no email id can be used without the user’s permission.

Many Spam filters are designed to help people who are constantly bombarded with junk or bulk mails. Spam filters make use of filtering technology to filter the contents of the incoming emails. Spam filters can effectively help a person by sorting out these types of incoming emails.

Different types of Spam filters can be helpful for controlling spam. Content based Spam filter is one type that can be used by you. The filter scans the content of the email, and searches for tell tale signs for Spam in the message. Content based Spam filters have however not been very effective in controlling the bulk or the junk messages. The main reason for this being that the spammers had devised ways and means by which they can communicate their message despite the presence of such filters.

Spam filters that are prepared these days are designed to give advanced protection against unsolicited emails and spammers. Bayesian filter technology is another effective way of controlling these mails. Bayesian technology is not like other filtering methods that search for Spam identifying words in the header and the subject line. The Bayesian filter uses the entire perspective of an email when it looks for characters or words for identifying a Spam. Another feature of Bayesian Spam filter is that the more it analyzes the incoming mails, the more it learns to identify Spam mails.

Spam mails can sometimes bombard you in such a manner that you may end up receiving more Spam than the regular emails. Most email service providers have Spam filter software enabled in their sites. All you need to do is select the options of setting the Spam filter for your emails according to your liking. You can mark the sites from which you want to receive or not receive mails in your inbox. Setting the options for blocking the bulk or the junk mails is entirely your prerogative.

About the author:

Author - MattGarrett http://www.free-spam-blockers.com