Filtering Internet Sites
Since the popularity of the internet has grown in the last ten years it has provided us with a wealth of information and convenience. Unfortunately, not all the information on the Internet is pleasant, accurate or unoffensive. Congress and the states responded in the late 1990s with censorship laws, but most of these have been struck down by the courts. Therefore, in the interest of our students at SBU, the Information and Technology Services has implemented a filtering software that restricts the on-campus computers from accessing offensive sites on the internet. Unfortunately, this sometimes causes problems for students by overblocking sites that are not offensive.
What is blocking/filtering software?
Blocking/filtering software is a mechanism used to:
- restrict access to Internet content, based on an internal database of the product, or;
- restrict access to Internet content through a database maintained external to the product itself, or;
- restrict access to Internet content to certain ratings assigned to those sites by a third party, or;
- restrict access to Internet content by scanning text, based on a keyword or phrase or text string, or;
- restrict access to Internet content by scanning pixels, based on color or tone, or;
- restrict access to Internet content based on the source of the information.
