What kind of sites are blocked by the different
blocking programs?
Q: How can I get a list of sites blocked by a given censorware
program?
Your first option is trial and error. You can download the program and try to
access different sites to see which ones are blocked. This
is how Peacefire came up with lists of sites that were blocked by the different
censorware programs when we examined them. You can go to
http://www.peacefire.org/censorware/
and find the program on that page, for a list of some of the sites that were blocked
when we tested it.
There have also been several cases where the encryption on a particular program's
blacklist was broken, and the entire list of blocked sites was posted to the
Internet. Peacefire broke the encryption on CYBERsitter's blocked site list and
published a program
called CSDecode in April
1997 that could be used
to decrypt the list of sites blocked by CYBERsitter 2.12. Anyone could get a list
of sites blocked by CYBERsitter by downloading CYBERsitter, downloading
our CSDecode program, and running it against CYBERsitter's list of blocked
sites.
In March 1997, TIME Magazine online posted
a tool called the "Censorware Search Engine", created by journalists who managed to
obtain decrypted copies of the blocked site lists used by Cyber Patrol, SurfWatch,
Net Nanny, CYBERsitter, and X-Stop. The user could enter a keyword and the search
engine would reply with a list of URL's from the different blacklists that contained
that keyword. CYBERsitter
added
TIME magazine to their list of blocked sites, apparently
in retaliation. But the Censorware Search Engine was taken permanently
offline in about August 1998 during an overhaul of the TIME Digital Web site.
Q: I heard that a site was
blocked by a particular program, but when I tested the program, it said
that the site was not blocked. What happened?
All blocked
sites listed on Peacefire.org were obtained through
trial and error, by testing the latest available copy of the program's blacklist
(unless -- in the case of CYBERsitter -- we were able to break the encryption on
the blacklist and examine it directly). In some cases, if we were worried that
the company might un-block a site after our report was published and deny that
the site was ever blocked in the first place, we asked reporters to go through
the list of sites and verify that they were blocked, before our page was
published.
Many examples of blocked sites listed on our pages are there to demonstrate that
the censorware company is not reviewing pages before blocking them, such as
the Vatican site blocked by X-Stop or the
Breast Cancer Legislation
site blocked by BESS. Even if these pages are un-blocked after the discovery is
made public, they still would not have been blocked in the first place if the
sites had been reviewed by a human first.
Q: How can I find out if my site is blocked by any of
the programs?
To find out whether your site is blocked by any other program, downloading
the program and installing it is the only choice you have.
Of all the companies that offer free downloads of their programs,
the trial versions block all
of the same sites that the full versions block (except for
the trial versions of Net Nanny and
WebSENSE).
Some programs -- usually proxy servers such as
BESS,
I-Gear and
SmartFilter -- do not have trial versions
that you can download, since they are for use by schools and companies but not by
home users. In that case, you have to contact the company to ask them if they
are blocking a Web site, or contact someone at a company or school that is using
the software, and ask them to test the URL for you.
Q: Why is it that "keyword blocking" cannot
really be
turned off?
The reason this doesn't work is because censorware companies
use keywords to generate the blacklist
itself. X-Stop, for example, uses a
program called
"MudCrawler"
to search the Web for pages containing words like
"xxx" in the title. As a result, sites are added to the blacklist that probably
would not have been added if they had been reviewed by a human first. The
Quakers home page and
the AIDS Memorial Quilt were
both discovered to be on X-Stop's blacklist.
Cyber Patrol, which developed
their own program called
CyberSpider
similar to X-Stop's MudCrawler, blocked a youth
soccer league, MapleSoccer.org,
because of a page that listed the teams in the categories
"Boys under 12", "Boys under 14", etc. These sites
were blocked even on computers where keyword blocking was disabled,
because they were on the program's blacklist.
A:
The controversy over blocking software does not center on the
blocking of chicken breast recipes, breast cancer information,
Anne Sexton, or "Superbowl XXX". It is true that these sites
are
accidentally
blocked by blocking software programs that scan pages
for certain keywords, as almost all of them do. However, the
controversy centers on sites that are blocked not accidentally
but deliberately. These are URL's that come pre-included
on the list of sites to be blocked by the program, regardless
of the content of the pages themselves. Some examples:
A: You cannot get a list of blocked sites by downloading a trial
copy of the
program. Even though most censorware programs have free-trial versions
that come with a copy of the blacklist,
the list is stored in an encrypted file that is
not supposed to be readable to the user. The only censorware program that
does not encrypt their blocked site list is
Net Nanny, however, their blocked
site list is not available with the free trial version.
You can get the entire list of sites blocked by CYBERsitter at:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mjk/cybersitter.html
and the entire list of sites blocked by Net Nanny at:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mjk/netnannysites.html
(even though the Net Nanny list didn't have to be decrypted). Peacefire is not
affiliated with these sites; the URL's themselves have information on how to contact
the author.
A: The company may have removed the site from their list since it
was discovered to be blocked. Even if the company has removed the site
from their blacklist, all users of the program have to download the latest
version of the blacklist before it will take effect on their computer.
Depending on who told you that the site was blocked, it might have been that
they received an error of a different kind (e.g. "404 File Not Found" or
"403 Forbidden") and thought that it was caused by the blocking software.
A: The following three companies have published "lookup forms" on
their Web sites where you can enter the URL of your page, and the form will
tell you whether it's blocked or not:
Note that some of these forms may return incorrect information. For example, if a
site is blocked automatically by Cyber Patrol because it has the word "sex" in the
URL, the site may still be listed as "not blocked" if you enter the URL in the form
on their site. To find out for sure if a program is blocking a Web site, you should
download and install the software.
A: Normally,
a site is blocked if (1) the URL is on the program's internally stored "blacklist"
or (2) the program detects certain keywords on the page and blocks it
automatically, whether
the URL is on the blacklist or not.
When a censorware program includes an option to "turn
keyword blocking off", this means that condition (2) no longer applies, so the
site will only be blocked if it's on the blacklist. Some users have
wondered if the really embarrassing errors caused by blocking software --
such as blocking sites about breast cancer -- can be avoided if you disable
keyword blocking.