Iowa State associate professor Doug Jacobson has developed a computer program that is giving schools control over which Internet programs students can access.

Developed a year ago at ISU, Jacobson’s Screendoor program has been test-marketed in area elementary schools.

It soon will be marketed nationwide by the start-up company Palisade Systems.

Jacobson, who teaches computer engineering classes at ISU, said the idea for the program originally came from talking to other people about how the Internet was being slowed by students playing “doom” type games.

No protection

“The system was not originally designed for protecting children from pornography,” Jacobson said. Yet after development on the project started, Jacobson decided that schools would provide a good test market for the program.

Jacobson said the Screendoor system will give schools the power to help enforce their individual Internet policies.

“I’m not in the business of telling schools they can never go to certain sites,” he said. “Some schools just want to watch and see what the students are doing, not shut them down.”

Jacobson said different schools will have very different guidelines for what is and is not appropriate for students, and the Screendoor program tailors to that.

“Catholic schools might not find pages that deal with condoms appropriate,” he noted.

Jacobson said feedback concerning the system has been positive.

“The schools that we have test-marketed in have been very pleased; they’ve said (the program) is superior to the other types of technology that are out there,” he said.

How it works

The Screendoor system works by observing source and destination information of various Internet sites.

The person controlling the system sets guidelines determining what connections are inappropriate.

When a connection is found to be inappropriate, the system terminates that connection before it can be completed.

Jacobson feels the problem of easy-access pornography on the Internet is growing.

“There are three different types of people putting this information on the Net,” he said.

The first type Jacobson refers to as “the good citizens.”

In this group Jacobson lists sites like Playboy magazine that feature a clear warning about the material contained on the site before it can be entered.

The second group Jacobson described consists of sites that people can connect to without being warned.

“Bang, there it is. There isn’t any warning before the pictures come up on the screen,” he said.

The third and worst group, according to Jacobson, are the sites that try to lure in Internet users any way they can — including young people.

As an example, Jacobson noted a time in which one of his graduate students was helping his 8-year-old daughter look for entertaining sites for children on the Internet.

What they found was anything but entertaining or appropriate for kids.

“They tried to do an Internet search by typing in the words ‘kid stuff’, and the number one site that came up listed by the search was a porn site,” he said.

Bad searches

Things like this can happen far too easily, Jacobson said, because a site can be listed in an Internet search even though it actually has nothing at all to do with the subject of the search.

“Search engines just look at the first page of a specific site and the number of times a word is mentioned,” he said.

Jacobson said that certain porn sites will go to extreme and rather odd lengths to lure people to their pages.

“The day after Tiger Woods won the Master’s — if you typed in the name Tiger Woods on a net search, the number one site listed was a porn site with absolutely nothing at all to do with Tiger Woods,” he said.

The site, Jacobson said, simply had the golfer’s name listed multiple times on the page in order to be the number one search result.