Everyone loves to hate "Bess". Bess is the Internet Retriever who "fetches" your web pages - or at least the ones he likes. The rest of the pages he blocks. This page suggests ways that you can teach and conduct research with Bess. Bess isn't going away anytime soon. Over 75% of all schools in the country are using filtered Internet access !

Who is Bess and who controls him?

Bess is a service run by a Seattle based company called N2H2 (www.n2h2.com). Unlike some Internet filtering solutions, Bess is not a software program installed on individual computers. Instead, Bess operates at the server, or network level, and provides filtering for every computer on the network. There are four servers that handle all Internet traffic for 26 school districts. Bess does not filter e-mail. It does keep a log of the web sites your computer has seen. What types of material is blocked?

Pornographic or sexually explicit material.

Illegal Material - drug markets, on-line gambling, warez, phreaking and cracking sites (sites that copy software illegally, steal credit cards, steal cell phone numbers, steal or destroy credit or medical information etc.)

Hate and extremist groups(OR WHAT THEY CONSIDER A HATE GROUP TO BE, LIKE THE NRA) - Nazis, militias, skinheads etc.

Free Email: Sites that offer e-mail accounts over the Web for free. Such sites can expose users to "harmful" content delivered via e-mail file attachments. Blocking such sites also helps to enforce local acceptable-use policies when e-mail is already provided locally to users.

School Cheating Info Pages: Any site that promotes plagiarism or similar cheating among students (such as by offering term papers, exam keys, etc.)

Tobacco and Drug Use Advocating or promoting recreational use of tobacco, alcohol or other drugs.

Free Page Websites-So that only corporate paid websites get to be viewed, nice!

How does Bess block a site?

Bess uses a combination of automated blocking and human review to make up the "block list" of sites that Bess will not fetch.

Automated Blocking

The automated blocking occurs when a web site URL contains obvious references to inappropriate material such as www.sexygirls.com. The automated blocking software does not search the contents of a page to determine whether the site contains sexually explicit material. It is looking at the site URL. Free Domains are Blocked Millions of new pages appear on these servers daily. Individual pages that have been reviewed by N2H2 on such sites are removed from the block list. A few well-known free servers are geocities.com, xoom.com, and anglefire.com. Free sites are where Bess gets the most complaints - "I wanted to see something about rose gardens and Bess blocked it!" The site was probably hosted on geocities.

How stuff works section:

E-mail, a inside look at how it works

Spam,and e-mail bombing, what it is, how to deal with it

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