PORNOGRAPHY AND THE INTERNET FILTERING THE INTERNET INTERNET FILTERS DETECTION OF OFFENSIVE WEBSITES TOPOLOGY OF INTERNET FILTERS

PORNOGRAPHY AND THE INTERNET

The World Wide Web has become a frontier for obscenity. Living in the information age means one-click access to the best museums, the menus of your favorite restaurants, immediate news coverage from around the globe, and a plethora of pornography unparalleled by any collection of materials in the history of the world. Children's access to internet pornography is a current concern of parents, educators, and government officials. The concern tends to manifest in the possibility that pornographic content negatively affects youth and is detrimental to the morality of society at large. For example, It instills poor self-image in women and young girls It is dehumanizing to women and young girls It leads to increased incidence of rape, child molestation, HIV and AIDS, home breakages It usually comes with drug addiction It introduces security threats since many viruses enter networks through web-based porno-content It creates a chain reaction leading to violence and other moral & societal decay Although children generally get exposed to Internet pornography very young, the nature of children's Internet use does not necessarily include pornography. Many children who have home access to the Internet and engage in online activities at least once a week, spend that time exploring the web (surfing and searching), using it for educational purposes (general learning, homework, research), communicating (instant messaging, emailing, chat rooms), utilizing entertainment features (playing

games, downloading and exchanging music, pictures, and videos), and e-commerce (learning about or buying things online). The issue then is not purposeful Internet pornography encounters but those encounters that are accidental. There is a strong belief amongst many parents that if children are exposed to sexual expression, it will lead to risky or immoral behavior. It is this belief that has lead to the preventative action of installing Internet filtering software onto computers in order to protect children from any potential harm.

FILTERING THE INTERNET

In an effort to protect children from internet pornography, parents, librarians, and school administrators are turning to technological filtering solutions that can allow them filter the internet. For most of human history the word filter has had an entirely unambiguous meaning. Ask the average person on the street to name a filter, and they will likely point to one of the following mundane objects of everyday life: The water filter traps chlorine and lead molecules The coffee filter keeps ground rhines out of the final product The cigarette filter removes some of the harmful carcinogenic compounds about to be inhaled. The physical aspect of these filtering processes is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionarys definition of filter, To pass (a liquid) through a filter, or some porous medium, for the purpose of removing solid particles or impuritie. The use and definition of filters shows that they are employed to get rid of something unwanted.

A byproduct of the last epoch of human history, the Industrial Revolution (focused on manufacturing), has been heavy levels of air and water pollution. As such, we have developed advanced air and water filters to keep our environment more or less livable. In the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution was replaced by the much hyped Information Revolution. The central difference between the industrial and the information revolutions is the shift from dealing with atoms to dealing with bits. The economic and cultural forces which shape our society are no longer governed by the manufacture of physical, atom-based goods (planes and cars), but rather the production and dissemination of vast amounts of information (news and entertainment). Due to incredible advances in computing, all of this information can now be digitized on the network of networks known as the Internet, and its graphical, multimedia counterpart, the World Wide Web. However, just like the pollution of the Industrial Revolution, the information society has its own unwanted byproducts. Perhaps the most problematic of unwanted consequences in the Information Revolution, is an overabundance of information. Due to the characteristics of bits described above, literally anyone can become an information producer, and make his/her content, regardless of quality, accuracy, relevance, or appropriateness (all value judgments) available to a world-wide audience on the Internet. While such low barriers to entry may be seen as very democratic, they have produced a situation where the information consumer must sort through garbage information. What is the solution to all of this unwanted, low quality information? Clearly the answer is information filters. However, it is extremely important to note the difference between the physical filters needed for the Industrial Revolution, and the information filters we need today. Physical filters deal with

physical world objectively defined atoms, molecules, particles, etc. If you do not want chlorine in you tap water, you study the properties of chlorine molecules, and develop a filter system which will prevent these molecules from passing through into the final product. This is in stark contrast to information filters which must sort through ideas which are inevitably subjectively defined artifacts of human experience and knowledge. In other words, describing a bit as relevant, truthful, accurate, appropriate, etc., means making value judgments about the digitized content it represents. These largely subjective decisions are coded into the headers of electronic documents, so that machines/individuals on the receiving end of the information can choose what to do with it. Deciding what to do with these bits, means using an information filter which uses subjective rules to decide about what content to let in, and what content to filter out. Indeed in an age of millions of web pages, information filters will become an absolute necessity for the average Nigerian.

INTERNET FILTERS
Nowadays there are some ways to stop pornographic images on computers, such as blocking unwanted sites or identifying images that show explicit content. There are some programs in the foreign market that allow blocking sites on Internet with offensive or explicit content such as: Net Nanny, Solid Oak Softwares CYBERsitter, The Learning Companys (now a division of Mattel) CyberPatrol, and SpyGlass Inc.s SurfWatch, ContentProtect, Family.net and K9 Web Protection. All these programs provide parental control to safeguard their children using the Internet. Many of these were developed around 1995, directly coinciding with The Great Cyberporn Panic. All market themselves as having the most extensive lists of blocked sites, and as parental empowerment tools.

In its product literature, Net Nanny proudly claims that it will protect your children and free speech on the Internet. It further advertises that due to its filters, Net Nanny will ensure on-line safety for your users.

Solid Oaks CYBERsitter claims to offer the safest way to explore cyberspace, for its 1.7 million users. It also claims to have by far the most technologically advanced filtering product on the market due to its use of an intelligent content recognitionsystem, which recognizes even brand new sites. Because of these technological advances, CYBERsitter is guaranteed to block over 95 percent of all objectionable content!

With six million users, Cyber Patrol advertises itself as the best way to manage childrens computer use and safety on the Internet. It claims that all 50,000 plus sites on its blocked list are reviewed by a team of Internet professionals, including parents and teachers. Cyber Patrol further claims that all blocked sites have been reviewed by human eyes.

SurfWatch claims that more than eight million copies of its product have been downloaded, thus making it the most popular, trusted product for harnessing the positive potential of the Internet. Its mission statement notes, we empower people with the information, technology, and tools they need to harness the positive potential of the Internet. With a blocked site list of more than 100,000 URLs, it claims to be 90-95 percent effective in blocking objectionable sites, and due to its team of professional web surfers the product will always remain up to date. SurfWatch also advertises that all blocked sites are seen by human eyes, and that difficult decisions are referred to an Advisory Committee of parents, professionals, teachers, law enforcement, clergy and community members. But do these products live up to their own hype? Do they protect children from dangerous content? Do they really empower parents? Are they 90-95 percent accurate in blocking dangerous content, and is it possible for their staff members to keep up with new material? The first and most important characteristic of all Internet filters, are the categories the products choose to focus on. Each company advertises its own unique categorization scheme, although all basically focus on pornography as their prime target. Some companies such as Cyber Patrol and SurfWatch are very explicit in their definitions for the content they evaluate. Others like CYBERsitter and Net Nanny offer no such information. One might call these category rules a rating system, and indeed they are.

Cyber Patrol is very explicit in defining and describing the types of content it blocks. The program tailors its blocking decisions based on the effect of the site on a typical twelve year old searching the Internet unaccompanied by a parent or educator. The product has twelve categories of blocked content: Violence/Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts, Gross Depictions, Intolerance, Satanic/Cult, Drugs/Drugs Culture, Militant/Extremist, Sex Education, Questionable/Illegal & Gambling, and Alcohol & Tobacco. Each of these categories carries an explicit definition, for example, Full Nudity is defined as pictures exposing any or all portions of the human genitalia. SurfWatch offers a very similar set of content categories, with explicit definitions, although it does not say which specific age group it is tailored for. Under its Core Category Criteria SurfWatch filters the following content: Sexually Explicit, Drugs/Alcohol, Gambling, Violence, and Hate Speech. Once content is categorized along the stated criteria, it is added to a list of blocked sites, in CyberPatrol this is called the CyberNOT block list, which is then distributed to paying customers. Some companies like SurfWatch offer daily updates, while others offer weekly and monthly updates. As mentioned above, these blocked site lists can contain as many as 100,000 off limits URLs. How do these companies go about categorizing the vast expanse of the web? All basically follow the same procedure, which includes the use of an artificial intelligence web spider which flags potentially inappropriate content for company employees to review, categorize, and add to their blocked sites lists. For example, Cyber Patrol employs the use of its Cyber Spyder to aid in categorization:

A review of the top ten internet filter software products on the market today can be found at http://internet-filterreview.toptenreviews.com/

DETECTION OF OFFENSIVE WEBSITES

All the major internet filters detect offensive websites through automatic customer feedback. Every time a user tries to connect to a site that is not in the filter database, the URL is sent to the vendor for analysis and classification. The categorised URL is then added to the local database at the next update, usually the day after. Depending on the local configuration, this either means that the site is blocked until it is categorised (unless it belongs to a blocked category), or that the site is accessible at least until next update. Another technique used by major filters for detecting offensive websites is webcrawlers. A webcrawler or webspider is a program that automatically and systematically browses the Internet and registers new sites and pages. With a basis in the filtering database, it visits known sites and registers all hyperlinks on those pages. Unknown hyperlinks are then added to a list of sites or pages to be categorised, and the program crawls on through the web. A number of techniques and clues are used by Internet filter producers to identify the nature of a website. The following list of such techniques is not exhaustive, but it covers the most important areas of categorisation.
1.

THE TEXTFILTERING APPROACH: One way to determine which kind of website we are dealing with is to consider the text or language on the pages. Certain words and phrases are believed to be specific to a genre, for example pornographic and gambling sites. The earliest filters used unintelligent keyword filtering, resulting in numerous false positives. A

ban on the word sex would for example block pages of educational or medical nature.
2.

OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (OCR): Text on Internet pages is usually written characters, each character uniquely identified by ASCII or Unicode. This text can be read and processed digitally. But sometimes the text is in the form of symbols or pictures instead, for instance when a document is scanned, and these pictures cannot be read as easily, even though a human reader would not see any difference from normal text. One needs a pattern recognition system to translate the images into machineedible text. A good OCR system recognizes text in graphics and images, analyses coloured type or transparent text on any background, and are capable of interpreting a variety of fonts, rotations etc. IMAGE ANALYSIS: While parents and educators tend to have more control on the information exposed to their children when surfing the web, the common textual approach (such as NetNanny, CyberSitter, and SurfWatch) does not offer 100% immunity. While failing to give enough immunity, the textfiltering approach blocks many useful sites, just because of the presence of some certain phrases. However, the owners of the harmful sites are inventing new methods for shutting down the textsearching immunity system. Approaches like onlypicture pages and safely named files are now just common. In recent years, the pictorial contentbased filtering is gathering more and more attention. There is ongoing research into image processing, skin detection, and pattern recognition techniques. The aim of these techniques is detecting naked people on the internet.

3.

By analysing the qualities of human skin and skin tones, it is possible to identify nudism or pornography. A widely used method for image recognition is called Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). It operates by analyzing the colour and geometry of images. This approach uses fundamental visual properties including background, texture, and shape. The information is then used to produce queried results based on the skin content of a picture that are above a certain threshold. There are a number of software programs on the market today, which can detect pornographic images within the computer. For example, Surfrecon offers a PornographyDetection Software for this purpose. Parabens Porn Detection Stick is another commercial software solution for detecting pornographic images. The company Access Data also offers a software solution for informatics forensics called Forensic Toolkit (FTK 3.1). This software is used for Explicit Image Detection.
4.

MANUAL INSPECTION: The major players in the filtering market do not leave it all to the machines. For example, SurfWatch claims that staff manually categorises new sites after an initial classification carried out by software tools. SurfWatch claims to update their database with up to 45,000 sites every week. They also admit to have less than 70 researchers, which means that each and every one of them has to categorise at least 130 sites per day.

TOPOLOGY OF INTERNET FILTERS

The model below shows the topology for all major filter systems. The content filtering software rests on a shared or dedicated server connected to the firewall or a proxy. All HTTP, FTP, and related traffic flow via this server.

Outgoing requests for HTTP, HTTPS or FTP connections, instant messaging (IM) and P2P networking are evaluated and blocked or permitted according to the filter database and the local configuration. If for example someone tries to access an URL in the block-list, the request is stopped, and a block- message is displayed in the browser window instead of the wanted webpage. The content of this message can be tailored to the users needs.