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Fwd: FC: Online Spy Kit Hits Home, by Steve Silberman



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Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 07:08:07 -0700
From: Steve Silberman <digaman@wired.com>
To: declan@well.com

http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/12440.html

Online Spy Kit Hits Home
by Steve Silberman
21.May.98.PDT

A new software package will be released on Friday that allows parents to
secretly monitor their kids' Internet usage.  While products have been used
to clock netsurfing at the office for a couple of years, some people
question whether or not covert supervision is a healthy way of keeping an
eye on where kids are going online.

The product, called Prudence, tracks all online destinations visited by
youthful netsurfers, recording URLs, bookmarks, cache activity, graphics
and cookies at intervals determined by the user.  Prudence can be
configured to simply log the information for parental perusal, or to
download and encrypt all graphics, storing them in a hidden file on the
user's hard drive for later scrutiny.

For the concerned parent who doesn't want to wait until the end of the work
day to discover that little Ashley or Leo has been dropping into
erotic.com, Aryan Nation, or gay.net, Prudence will email logs to a parent
at the office, issuing an update every few minutes[...]


**********************************
Steve Silberman
Senior Culture Writer
WIRED News
   http://www.wired.com/
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