[From this morning's Netly News. Check out the HTML version of the article at netlynews.com for links to the threatening letters, etc. --Declan] The Netly News http://netlynews.com/ December 20, 1996 The CyberSitter Diaper Change By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Brian Milburn is angry. The president of Solid Oak Software, makers of the CyberSitter Net-filtering software, has seen his company's product come under heavy fire this year. Its offense? Critics say that CyberSitter has reached far beyond its mandate of porn-blocking and instead has censored innocuous, even invaluable web sites. I admit I'm one of its critics. In a CyberWire Dispatch that Brock Meeks and I published in July, we revealed that the censorware bans such places as the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the online home of the National Organization for Women. Our Dispatch showed the world -- or at least our readers -- that the makers of CyberSitter have a clear political agenda. The article prompted follow-ups in CyberTimes and the National Law Journal and an editorial in the Washington Post with an exchange of letters to the editor between a NOW executive and a representative of Focus on the Family, a conservative group that markets CyberSitter. To Milburn's mind, our act of revealing the truth about his company's product was, literally, criminal. In August, he told us that he had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation into the publication of our article. He was particularly upset with one paragraph that included a fragment of his database demonstrating that CyberSitter expressly bans info about gay society and culture. He wrote: "Your willful reverse engineering and subsequent publishing of copyrighted source code is a clear violation of US Copyright law. While we would easily prevail in a civil court in seeking damages... we will seek felony criminal prosecution under 17 USCS sect 503(a) of the Copyright Act, and are preparing documentation to submit with the criminal complaint to FBI [sic]." Milburn was upset because CyberSitter's database is scrambled to prevent kiddies from grabbing addresses of porn sites from it. It's lightweight encryption, sure, but just enough to frustrate Junior. The scrambled database also allows Solid Oak to add and delete banned sites without the user's knowledge -- something that we believe is a dangerous practice. Now, I should point out here that neither I nor Brock did the actual decrypting; we had received a copy of the descrambled filter list from a confidential source. In any event, Dispatch's attorneys replied to Milburn, saying that the article was "protected by the full force of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution" and fell squarely within the copyright act's "fair use" provisions. We never heard back from him or the FBI. But that nastygram from Milburn wasn't his last. As criticism of CyberSitter becomes more intense, he's stepped up his counterattacks, threatening legal action, blocking critics' sites, or both. Take Bennett Haselton, a college student who cobbled together a site called Peacefire in August. This fall he started an anti-CyberSitter page that listed some of the more controversial actions of the software. Milburn complained. On December 6 he wrote to Haselton's Internet provider, Media3 Technologies, and tried to persuade them to give Peacefire the boot. His e-mail said: "One of your subscribers has made it his mission in life to defame our product as he appearantly [sic] has a problem with parents wishing to filter their children's access to the internet." Another charge was that Haselton had linked to a copy of our Dispatch. Solid Oak then added Peacefire and Media3 to its list of blocked sites. To Marc Kanter, Solid Oak's marketing director, it was necessary. "The site directly has links to areas that have our source code decoded on it.... There's no reason that our users should be able to go to sites that effectually inactivate our program," he said. Milburn also accused Haselton of reverse-engineering CyberSitter to get the text of its database -- that is, of being the confidential source for the CyberWire Dispatch. "Reverse engineering had to have been done in order to get the information, and we believe Mr. Haselton was the one who did it," Milburn wrote. Note to Millburn: Haselton wasn't our source. Then there's the case of Glen Roberts. His web page giving instructions on how to disable CyberSitter is now banned -- as is his Internet service provider. That's because CyberSitter differs from its competitors CyberPatrol and SurfWatch, which can restrict access by URL; instead, CyberSitter has to block access to the entire ripco.com domain. So what's my problem, really? If people don't want to use CyberSitter or other nanny apps, they don't have to. It's voluntary. It's effective. It protects children, and it sure is better than the Communications Decency Act. I have one major objection to all of the software filters currently on the market: Consumers have no way of knowing what's being blocked. Without knowing what's on the filter list, parents can't know what Junior will or won't be seeing. When reporters who try to reveal that information are faced with potential criminal investigations, the press's ability to shed light on these companies is threatened. Such programs also give parents near-complete control over what their children can and can't read. Traditionally, kids have been able to browse the stacks of a library away from parental supervision. But when the library is online, access can be completely controlled by censorware. Pity the closeted gay son of homophobic parents, prevented by CyberSitter from accessing soc.support.youth.lesbian-gay-bi. Finally, it's a kind of intellectual bait-and-switch. The "smut blockers" grab power by playing to porn, then they wield it to advance a right-wing, conservative agenda. Family values activists would never have been able to pass a law that blocks as many sites as CyberSitter does. Besides censoring alt.censorship, it also blocks dozens of ISPs and university sites such as well.com, zoom.com, anon.penet.fi, best.com, webpower.com, ftp.std.com, cts.com, gwis2.seas.gwu.edu, hss.cmu.edu, c2.org, echonyc.com and accounting.com. Now, sadly, some libraries are using it. Solid Oak claims 900,000 registered users. ###