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Mary Minow did a great presentation today on CIPA and its ramifications. It is available as an archive from Infopeople. One of the very interesting points she made was that the CIPA regs only apply to visual depictions of the various forbidden categories of things. So I emailed Surfcontrol, WebSense, Smartfilter, iPrism, CyberPatrol and Symantec to find out if their filter product could be set up to turn the "blocked" site into a text-only site. Seems possible to me and wouldn't that be a much better solution! Stay tuned.

With all the hoopla about the Supreme Court decision to allow CIPA to stand, it is incumbent on all current and potential filter users to learn how Internet content filtering products work. I see post after post on the discussion lists that make it clear to me that people don't know how they work, what options they have for controlling how they work and think one product works the same as another. In some cases, the lack of understanding has to do with the fact that the products are maintained by administrators "upstream" (the county for example).