The internet is continually evolving reaching more and more groups of people and despite our best efforts to ignore it we have to admit that an internet connection has almost reached the level of popularity and usage of the common TV or telephone.
Unfortunately, while we struggle through the wondrous world of internet banking, search engines, e-mail, online stores and literally thousands of other things that will hopefully lead to an easier life many of us realize that the internet is by no means a child-friendly environment.
Adult content is randomly mixed in with seemingly harmless pages and a simple search on one of the many popular search engines will often reveal tremendous amount of x-rated or otherwise offensive material when searching for something as harmless as 'Barbie doll'.
Once an adult related page is opened it is often followed by countless pop-ups, pop-unders and whatnot all related to adult content often making it hard to escape the bottomless pit of x-rated content simply because the pop-ups come quicker than they can be closed.
To make matters worse there is no simple way to turn 'off' adult content on the web and if there were our children who are regularly more computer savvy than us would probably not tell us about it.
Naturally in today's environment basic computer and internet skills are required practically everywhere and the sooner we can teach our children to handle the concepts and options given to us by world wide web the better they will be able to handle the problems of a modern day environment.
The internet can provide more than just a few hours of entertainment for our children and its uses range from dictionary through translator to homework aid. With a library often out of reach or incomplete the internet is capable of providing information on practically any subject known to humankind and as a result is an invaluable tool for your child's education.
The phrase "damned if I do, damned if I don't" may spring to mind at this point when weighing the benefits and drawbacks of letting your child surf the world wide web, but thankfully there are quite a few ways to restrict your child's surfing capacities to non-adult content sites.
Providing a more or less safe environment is as simple as installing one of the many surf protection programs or 'web sitters' as they are called. Since it is not always as easy as one may hope to select the appropriate 'web sitter' for our child and most 'web sitters' are not entirely the same we will take a look at the more popular programs and how they work.
The first rule of thumb when dealing with 'web sitters' is: "No 'web sitter' is perfect".
While many filter out up to 95% of all adult and offensive content a certain measure of adult supervision is definitely required (just like you would check on your child while he/she is watching TV).
Additionally it is wise to figure out how computer savvy your child actually is, simply because most 'web sitters' can be de-activated almost as easily as they are activated (if you know how).
Despite these two minor drawbacks in general 'web sitters' can be trusted with the task of keeping adult or offensive web content away from your child or your child away from adult or offensive web content (Whichever the case may be).
A 'web sitter' is an independent program that you can install on your computer that 'monitors' the searches that are done by the person using the computer. Its primary goal is to restrict access to adult content sites (or violent ones) and to achieve this it maintains a sizable list of 'blacklisted keywords'.
Since most of us are familiar with search engines (if not go try one at http://www.google.com or http://www.k.st/search ) it becomes easy to explain 'keywords'. A keyword is used by the search engine to search for specific pages. If for example you would perform a search on 'Barbie dolls' the words 'Barbie' and 'dolls' would be the keywords of your search.
With this in mind we can easily make a short list of possible blacklisted keywords. 'Erotic' to name a less-crude example would be one of those blacklisted keywords but also letter combinations such as 'xxx' are included in this list.
The 'web sitter' uses this list of keywords to create another list, this time of websites that contain one or more of the blacklisted words in their title (e.g. www.someXXXsite.com).
If someone tries to access any of these sites while the 'web sitter' is active then the classic 404 site not found will appear or some other page generated by the 'web sitter' indicating that the site has been blocked by the 'web sitter'.
The 'web sitter' doesn't keep the user from entering any of the blacklisted keywords in the internet explorer address bar nor does it prevent the user from entering the offensive words into a search engine. It only makes it impossible for offensive sites to be viewed.
For example: while it is possible to do a search on 'xxx' in google with the 'web sitter' active it would not be possible to open any of the pages displayed in the search results since all of them will contain the blacklisted keyword 'xxx'.
