Free Internet Security

Internet filter is a software solution, commonly known as a content-filtering solution or web filtering solution that is designed and configured to make decisions on the type of the sites and content on those sites the users are allowed to visit.

The content filtering device decides on what content should be made available to the user and what shouldn’t be.

The reason to have such a solution is basically to have a kind of internet censorship on the users using a particular system where the software is installed.

Initially these kinds of solutions were normally used in home environments where the parents would like to have control on the content available to their children while they are browsing the Internet. Basically to keep the children away from pornography, violence, terrorism, etc.

Later on the internet filtering took on a whole new leap and was realized to have potential for corporate internet control and later on even country level internet control.

Organization around the world saw the benefits of internet control as a way of limiting the sites that users can navigate to during their work hours. This served the dual purpose of preventing the employees from wasting their work time on entertainment and personal work and protection of the corporate network from the malicious content that the users might visit accidentally while browsing the web.

The internet filtering tool a whole new censorship meaning when countries across the world started adopting the filtering technology at the ISP level and at the internet perimeter of the country to block certain unwanted sites. A good example would be the blocking of pornographic sites in some countries where it is considered illegal to view such content.

There are various kinds of filtering techniques that are employed:

Host based filtering: Through this technique software is installed on the system by the administrator and rules are configured according to the needs of the administrator.

Now when the normal users try to browse internet and the browsing activity is in violence of the rules that have been set by the administrator, the content will be blocked and the user shall not be able to view it.

Server side filtering: This methodology is normally adopted by companies and organizations at the gateway level. The company can install a hardware or a software that is capable filtering traffic at the gateway level and rules would be configured that will apply to all the users inside the company network.

Content Filtering at the ISP level: many internet service providers now days are providing such a service at some additional cost along with the internet link.

The companies and organization who do not wish to invest in their own gateway level content filtering device can go for this option and notify the ISP of their content filtering conditions. Based on those conditions, the ISP would filter the traffic at the ISP level itself.

Content filtering is also done at browser level as well, but this methodology is not as effective as the other three options. The reason is that users can change the browser settings and by pass the filtering that has been set through the browser.