Anti-filtering activists at the Censorware Project (CWP) are charging that N2H2's Bess proxy-level Internet filter bars K–12 students in 10 states from visiting such innocuous sites as Redbook magazine, while allowing access to hundreds of sites classified as pornographic by the Yahoo search engine.
Released July 28, Passing Porn, Banning the Bible: N2H2's Bess in Public Schools summarizes the results of a July 23–26 test CWP volunteers conducted of the software's proxy server. "If Bess cannot even keep up with what's posted to the Net's most popular Web index, how can it hope to keep up with the Net as a whole?" principal author Jamie McCarthy asks.
The report speculates that overbroad blocking may be more profitable: The firm's mid-July stock prospectus outlines a plan to sell banner advertising on Bess's Searchopolis engine, to which the software would return users when it denied a search request.
In March, CWP released a similarly unflattering report on the performance of SmartFilter in Utah schools.
