Officials at the Big 3 of Internet portals — America Online (AOL) , the Microsoft Network (MSN)
and Yahoo!
— announced Tuesday that 93 percent of their Web sites are
now labeled to prevent children from accessing adult and questionable
material, but the real effectiveness of the program remains to be seen.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 74 percent of
computers in public schools around the U.S. had filtering technology in
place by the end of 2000. The ICRA is now making a push for filtering
technology in the home.
Using a free downloadable program distributed by the Internet Content
Rating Association (ICRA), parents can ostensibly keep their children from
harm.
A source code check on a MSN search using one objectionable word prompts a
user warning that NightSurf.com has offensive material, though if the ICRA
filter is turned off, the user can continue on to the site. With the
filter in place, children can’t visit the site:
<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content='(PICS-1.1
http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html” l gen true comment “RSACi North
America Server” for “http://www.nightsurf.com” on “2000.06.13T20:20-0800” r
(n 4 s 4 v 0 l 4))’>
Of course, the remaining seven percent of offensive content on AOL, Yahoo!
and MSN will likely still give parents a fit, such as George Carlin’s “An
Incomplete List of Impolite Words,” which hasn’t been labeled yet and
available on a Yahoo! e-shopping page.
Armed with the latest version of ICRAfilter, it’s impossible to
visit some of the racier sites on Yahoo!, even some seemingly innocent Web
pages. With the default filtering settings established, access is blocked
to every Yahoo! room except for finance, travel and the Yahooligans! areas.
The filter is certainly effective, at least until the child goes down into
the taskbar and disables the program in the “Suspend Filter” area, or goes
into the Task Manager and ends the ICRAsrv.exe and ICRAui.exe
programs. It’s a loophole most children of the 21st century can take
advantage of and one many less-technical parents are unaware is even possible.
For Windows users, this means setting up an administrator persona and
separate logins for each member of the family, to ensure children can’t
change the settings from their account. For Apple , Sun
Microsystems and Linux users, it doesn’t matter; the
software is only compatible with the Windows operating system, version 95
and later. ICRA officials were unavailable for comment on timetable for
bringing other platforms into the filtering fold.
Microsoft is one of the leading members of the ICRA coalition, which
includes Cable & Wireless , Bertelsmann Foundation, AOL,
VeriSign and Verizon
.
So far, more than 15,000 users have downloaded the ICRA filtering
program. Officials are leery of users downloading the program to act as
“proxy parents” for their children’s online activities.
To counter that potential problem, the ICRA and other organizations are
promoting an awareness campaign.
Dick Thornburgh, chair of the committee that released a May 2 report
entitled, “Youth, Pornography and the Internet,” through the National
Research Council on behalf of Congress and the Departments of Justice and
Education, said in a statement that technology alone isn’t the answer.
“Our study found that technology cannot provide a complete — or even
nearly complete — solution,” he said. “Indeed, though some might wish
otherwise, no single approach — technical, legal, economic, or educational
— will be sufficient to address all of the relevant issues. Rather, an
effective framework will require a balanced composite of all of these
elements, and real progress will require forward movement on all of these
fronts.”
