March 13, 2000 06:00pm
Porn Sites Using New Methods to Fool Internet Filters
Source: Business Wire
by: Company Press Release
(SANTA BARBARA, CA) -- Solid Oak Software Inc., publishers of the popular Internet filtering product CYBERsitter, are employing new technology to find and block pornography sites.
According to Brian Milburn, president and CTO of Solid Oak, many adult content Web publishers have developed new methods to hide their Web sites from filter robots and make keyword identification impossible. Many of these sites are using Javascript encryption to make the HTML source documents unintelligible. The user's browser translates the page when it loads, effectively bypassing intelligent content recognition methods used by CYBERsitter and a few other filtering products.
``The only reason a Web publisher would do this would be to hide the content of their Web site,'' Milburn said. ``Most robots are not Javascript-enabled, and the porn publishers probably know this.''
This flies in the face of arguments that porn publishers are not trying to make their sites easily accessible to children. In addition to encryption, porn site owners are increasingly making use of domain names that might be misspellings of popular kid's products or activities.
``We recently had a customer purchase our product because her daughter, who was on a swimming team in school, tried to access swimming.com. She left out an `M' and ended up at a porn site,'' Milburn said. ``There are thousands of others.''
According to Milburn, Solid Oak gets hundreds of reports of adult sites daily. ``Because we have been around so long, most people know the CYBERsitter name and know where to report objectionable sites. This makes it much easier for us to identify trends in the adult Web site industry.''
Do these new tactics affect the effectiveness of CYBERsitter? ``Absolutely not!'' insisted Milburn. ``We have always been at the leading edge of content recognition and we intend to stay there. We are now employing methods that identify encrypted sites and flag them for review.''
Solid Oak has also found that many of these sites are hosted on popular free Web hosting sites. Many of these companies use their own methods to scan Web pages for content that does not comply with their acceptable use policies. In addition to fooling the filters, the encryption also effectively hides the sites' content from the Web hosting company as well.
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