Pornography Content Filter

CIPAFilter's pornography content filter engine is a different and powerful system, designed to meet the needs of schools and libraries, in an open and honest manner, without generating the problems commonly found in other filtering systems.

It was designed to never block legitimate web-sites, even controversial subjects such as safe sex, gay rights, and breast cancer, while blocking the most pornography - all automatically without any management and user intervention required. That means not having to unblock users and computers, and constantly white-list web-sites that should not have been blocked.

Problems with today's filtering systems!

The problem with traditional content filters is simple. They do not block enough pornography, and content from other categories, and generate many false positives (over-blocking), requiring the filtering systems to be constantly updated, managed and "babysat", in order to keep the user complaints at a minimum. These filters can also be easily circumvented by using freely available proxy services, or using cached web-pages not found in the "blacklist database".

The reason these filtering systems cannot function correctly, is because they are constantly playing a cat-and-mouse game, by continually being updated by individuals and batch processes, to keep a current database of all the categorized web-sites they deem inappropriate. Filters using these lists can simply not keep up with the new volume of web-pages moving around and being posted on the Internet every day. Instead, they end up creating a system that constantly blocks random and legitimate sites, and can't keep up with the desired percentage of categories selected to be blocked by the administrator. Giving the Internet a "G-Rating", simply does not work.

How CIPAFilter Works.

CIPAFilter solves this process by providing a "set-and-forget" filtering system that never needs updated and does not require any management. CIPAFilter is a truly context-sensitive engine that intercepts and analyzes each page as it passes through, and automatically blocks it as appropriate. Since most all pornographic sites have text, it is easy for CIPAFilter's fine-tuned system to identify pornography, while keeping the context of words used, to eliminate false positives.

The goal is that a user should never notice there is a filter present on the network, unless he or she is specifically attempting to access pornography. This way, the filter should not need to be disabled for any users.

CIPAFilter's engine creates high quality results by using a balance between "good", "bad" and "cancel" words. By carefully balancing these variables, we have built a pornography filter that displays complex emergent behavior. If CIPAFilter finds a "bad" word, such as "breast" or "tit", it looks for cancel words on the page, such as "chicken", "cancer", "wildlife", "bird", etc - finding in what context these words were used on that particular page, and ignores words as necessary when they are used in good context.

As you can see, with this technique carefully balanced, we can focus on the inappropriate context of a word, while avoiding the ever present collateral damage that other filters cause. CIPAFilter will block pages about child pornography without blocking child molestation support groups and victim stories. CIPAFilter blocks gay porn, but not gay rights organizations. CIPAFilter's filtering is so effective that you will forget its running on the network. No false positive web-sites will result in fewer user complaints, and less management required for a successful filtering implementation.

What about blocking other sites, besides pornography?

CIPAFilter also comes with a white and black-list that can be easily managed from the web-management interface. The white-list simply provides an override to the automatic filtering system, and the black-list allows an administrator to block additional web-sites as needed, such as mail.yahoo.com, Google image searches, or www.hotmail.com.

CIPAFilter also provides some additional categories not included in the automatic filtering system. Popular image search, Gambling and Game sites are currently included.

Other inappropriate sites may also be blocked, but goal is to keep the black-list use at a minimum, to avoid getting caught up in trying to keep every single bad page out of the network.

When a user attempts to access a pornographic web page, and trips the filter, CIPAFilter will automatically generate an e-mail to the administrator. This e-mail is easily configured on the web page, and allows instant notification of users that are attempting to access pornography. The e-mail will include the username (if using Web Authentication), IP Address of the offending computer, optional computer name (with appropriate configuration), score of the tripped site, and the URL. The time it happened is the time that the e-mail was received. You can ignore the e-mails and refer to them as necessary, chose not to receive them. The trip also gets recorded in the web reporting database for that user or IP address.