BlockXXX Home
Parental Controls for Firefox
Author: Tom Christensen
Version: 0.4.0
Sponsor: SinglePoint Networks Check Them out Please!
Howto: For Version .2+
Problem:
In The latest versions of blockxxx I have moved the scanning to the DOMDocumentReady event. This makes the scanning occur before the page is displayed and in most cases prevents any pictures from being shown. There is one side case where this does not apply. If the page has frames, I get the DOMDocumentReady event when the frameset document is ready. Scanning on the frameset document is pretty pointless.. I need to wait until the actual frame's content document is loaded. So sites with frames still have the delayed removal of pics and links.
Design and purpose of BlockXXX:
I started work on BlockXXX simply to protect my small brothers from mis-typing urls and getting porn. I decided early on to not use a stringent "blacklist" type design, as there are hundreds of new porn sites added to the net daily, and the overhead involved in keeping an accurate blacklist is way too high. BlockXXX scans the actual HTML document for tell-tale words and phrases. If it finds these words it disables all images and hyperlinks on the page. This design in some cases causes pictures or links to be available for a couple seconds before they are disabled. This is obviously undesirable, however the option to move to a blacklist system is even more undesirable.
Current Features
Version .2: Finally! I found some time this week to pull this extension out and update it and get the next version released. I started a new company on Jan 1st, and for a couple months before that we were heavily in planning/business plan development/etc... Check us out here. So I apologize for the long length of time between updates, and hopefully over the next couple months things will be more regular. So here it is, version .2, it includes password protection, locking, and enable/disable scanning. Please read the howto for usage of the new featuers. Thank you comments welcome at tom at technerve dot com.
Version 0.2.7: The 0.2.7 version has a change that makes the dialog boxes draw properly in windows. The 0.2.6 version had parts of the dialog cut off in Windows. This release also includes a French and Italian locale thanks to Luana and Jean-Bernard. This test release has a first try at a word filter. You enter a list of words in the options dialog, and those words will be replaced on websites by ****. Please let me know how this works for you, it is working ok for me right now but I need some feedback as to its accuracy. Please send comments to tom at technerve dot com.
Roadmap
Version .3: This version will incorporate a word scanning mechanism as suggested on mozillazine, which will scan for a list of words, and remove them or replace them with @#$%!@!. Configuration for this feature will be added allowing the list of words to be changed at will. This version will also contain an administrative dashboard type feature whereby after authenticating a person can see what text is failing on the site. This will allow for fine grained control of the regex, allowing false positives to be detected and fixed quickly.
Version .4: Here I will begin implementing a statistical analysis algorithm to determine whether a site is pornographic or not. This will be rather involved and probably won't be completed for some time. Will add configuration options to change the list of words in the regex used to determine pornographic content, and will add options to change settings of the statistical analysis.
Version .5: There will probably be quite a wait before this version is released, as it will contain the statistical analysis detection rules and algorithm. Will begin cache mechanism whereby a site determined to be pornographic will be listed, and will not need to be scanned in the future but will be "known bad".