Short Filtering Glossary for
"A look at Internet Filtering Technologies"

Hardware Filtering: configurations to hardware such as routers to disallow specific services to pass through the hardware

Software Filtering: software designed to examine Internet content before delivery to the desktop

Client-side filtering: software is loaded locally on a workstation

Server-side filtering: software is loaded on a server either locally or on a remote site

Proxy server filtering: software is loaded on a remote server that may also cache visited sites for more efficient local network performance

Rating systems: labels embedded into web documents that provide a standard rating system that can be read by a web browser or specialized search engine

Keyword blocking: a predefined list of words deemed inappropriate is examined before delivery of an Internet document to the desktop. If any of the words are present, the document will be blocked

Protocol blocking: sweeping block that prevents access to any site in the specified protocol (IRC and Newsgroups are the most commonly blocked protocols)

Host blocking: sites are rated by individuals or groups and added to a database used by the software. Before delivery of a document to the desktop, the database is checked and if the requested URL is present, or is on a blocked host, the document is inaccessible

Characterized Content Rating: a community of users rates individual URLs and categorized by topic, quality and maturity level before being placed in a database. A special search engine provides results accessed from the database. Subscription to the search service allows local configuration to provide results based on the ratings if desired

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