[Bushwacker777]

Beware of these blocking services. At a school I worked for you could not access sites dealing with breast cancer nor could you access "extremist" websites (including Right to Life sites).

[longjack]

Beware of these blocking services.

Filters may use an ACL (Access Control List) with a list of known URL's, and/or can read the content of a page before it is loaded, and block those with enough blacklisted words to score beyond a specific tolerance threshold.

A 'stock' Filter may block a variety of sites generically deemed inappropriate for children, but the sysadmin should be able to put valid educational sites into an exception list that will not be filtered.

On our filters I put an e-mail link to me on the page that loads when a site is blocked. The email sends me the URL of the blocked site for my review, and if it is a legitimate site for their school work I can unblock it in a minute or so.

[Vicki]

If you want to be able to access a blocked web site in any of the software you can just go into administration and release it. But most of the softwares have already removed those sites from their black list which are updated regularly.

When our kids were young they were on a filtered internet service and they were able to find whatever they needed.