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Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
Surf Monkey safety (Oct. 22, '99 issue)
Surf Monkey 's aim is to be a guide, not a censor, for young cyberspace explorers. As CEO David Smith put it, "While some organizations are trying to close the Internet down for kids, our approach has been to open the Net up for them - provide a launchpad to the far corners of cybersapce, keeping them safe along the way as a guide and companion."
He's talking about kids 2-12. Surf Monkey professes to do that by providing the two-part solution we reported on earlier: 1) a Web site that is both a safe "playground" in itself and a launchpad (via its "white list" of sites useful to kids) into the safe parts of cyberspace and 2) the Surf Monkey Bar that parents put on their home computer which adds safety technology (server- and client-based filtering) to their children's surfing experience. It's an add-on to users' existing browsers. (There will soon be a new stand-alone browser that's very small, less than 100K, David told us.)
The way the technology works is a positive note, too: Surf Monkey decided kids didn't need to be protected from the Net behind a "firewall" - that heavy-handed approach corporations take (usually necessarily) to keep their own networks safe and secure. So in developing their solution, Surf Monkey didn't take the standard approach of many filtered Internet services, David told us. "There's no firewall or proxy server involved. We just designed our own custom server software specifically for kids and filtering. It's a much more efficient approach than our first-generation one," he added, referring to the disk-space-heavy filtering browser that customers had to download from a CD-ROM Surf Monkey sent out. By putting the filtering technology mostly on a server that all its customers connect through when they're online, the database of child-inappropriate sites can be updated constantly. (BTW, we're beginning to think that client-based filtering - a solution that only involves software on a home or school PC - will soon be a dinosaur unless it can be paid for by subscription and updated constantly through downloads from its developer's Web site. But that's another story.)
When families use both features, Web site and Monkey Bar, every page a child downloads is filtered twice. First the server looks at whether the site the child's going to is on the Surf Monkey black list of inappropriate sites (more than 700 new sites are added to the black list daily, David told us). "That takes a fraction of a second," he said. "If the page is approved by the server, the page downloads, but before it's displayed in the browser [Microsoft's Explorer or Netscape], it's filtered on the fly," so that any text on the page containing profanity or sexual references, for example, is blocked. The categories of blocked sites are fairly standard - pornography, gangs' sites, illegal drugs, alcohol, hate, gambling, violence - those of SurfWatch, whose filtering technology Surf Monkey has licensed. Disclosure of criteria that SurfWatch uses to decide what's inappropriate for kids is in its site.
Surf Monkey wouldn't really be a safety solution if it didn't have safe email, chat, and discussion-board areas as well. "When kids come to our site they become space pilots," David said. "With their space controllers they set up a list of cyber friends they can communicate with." They actually do this with their parents in the password-protected area, we're told. Any emails a child receives from someone not on the list is "locked" until a parent can read it and decide if her child can too. The same mechanism will work for Surf Monkey's forthcoming private chat rooms and personal bulletin boards (a child will be able to host her own chats or discussions with people on her approved buddy list). For a little over a year the company has provided "public" chat for registered Surf Monkey users only - with their parents' permission. It's monitored by human beings and is open every day for a three-hour window. Chat rules are posted up front, and anyone who breaks them gets booted!
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