It Doesn't Take an Act of Congress to Get Rid of Offensive or Annoying Internet Content.
Michael Swaine
YOU SAW IT ON CNN: A runaway teen returns safely home after being lured away by a stranger who sent her sexually explicit material over the Internet. The Net can be a dangerous place. Like the rest of the world.
Or like the U.S. Senate, which on June 14 passed a bill denying Internet users the basic rights of free speech now exercised in books, magazines, and face-to-face conversation. Bill Duvall thinks there's a better way to protect children. He wrote the software that sent the first packet across the Internet back in 1969, and he won the first MacUser Editor's Choice award for a development product. His latest brainchild is SurfWatch, available from SurfWatch Software (415-948-9500). It's a program that helps parents, teachers, and employers block access to sexually explicit Internet sites. SurfWatch blocks entire newsgroups, plus World Wide Web, ftp, Gopher, and chat sites. It uses a list of sexy sites, updated by subscription ($5.95 a month), and a pattern-matching scheme to ferret out sexual content by reading packets as they arrive at your Mac. It works with MacTCP-based connections, not online services. SurfWatch costs $50.
Of course, SurfWatch can't deflect all offensive content, which is the Catch-22 of all information filtering: Until you've seen it, you don't know whether it's objectionable. This is true whether you're trying to screen out sex, kill commercials, or just divert a rushing info stream. Imperfect as filtering tools are, though, they can be a godsend when your information cup runneth over.
The E-mail Malaise. Take e-mail. Some mail readers (Qualcomm's Eudora Pro, Claris Emailer, and InterCon's Postal Shark) can filter incoming mail. If you get hundreds of messages a day, set up some filters.
Hundreds of messages a day?
Well, say you're interested in creating a World Wide Web page. So you subscribe to the Apple Internet Authoring mailing list (by sending the message "subscribe apple-internet-authoring " to listproc@abs.apple.com) and the HTML Authors Guild list (send "subscribe html-authors-guild " to majordomo@lists .stanford.edu). You then take the weekend off and discover 400 messages waiting for you on Monday morning.
Now that you know what to expect, you can set up rule-based filters to do triage on this mess. Keep the Web-related stuff in one mailbox, or send messages from certain brain-dead bozos directly into the Trash. You can filter by subject, keeping everything involving MacHTTP or Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs), for example.
Just the News That Fits. John Norstad's NewsWatcher is one of the best tools for accessing Usenet newsgroups, but it doesn't yet have filtering. However, David Brewster and Bob Boonstra's exemplary (and free) spin-off, VA NewsWatcher, does provide filtering; it's available at ftp://grocne.enc. org/pubV.A.NewsWatcher/. With VANewsWatcher, you can kill, keep, or highlight (in one of five colors) any posting, based on its subject, author, keyword, or date. Say you're looking for a used Power Mac. You could subscribe to the comp.sys.mac.wanted newsgroup and set up a filter to keep only postings with Power Mac in the subject line, and delete the rest. Or if you don't want to miss other bargains, set the filter up to simply highlight Power Mac messages in red, sorting the highlighted postings to the top.
Or you could let someone do it for you: The Stanford Netnews Filtering Service, which you'll find at http://woodstock .stanford.edu:2000/, enables you to build a profile of your interests and then regularly sends you Usenet articles that match your profile.
Tip of the Month
You can use two e-mail filters simultaneously for a finer-toothed comb. If you really like reading what Jane Jones has to say on your favorite mailing list but don't have time for the rest, create a filter that drops list postings into a convenient folder but sends Jane's contributions to your in box.
Don't Know E-mail from Snail Mail?
MacUser maintains a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Internet, MacUser itself, and this column specifically. Send mail to faq@macuser.com. MacUser's address on the World Wide Web is http://www.macuser.ziff.com/~macuser/. You can reach me at traveler@macuser.com.
