U.S. District Court Judge Edward F. Harrington has ordered programmers Eddy L. O. Jansson and Matthew Skala to stop distributing a “cphack” utility that reveals the type of sites blocked by the popular Internet filtering software CyberPatrol. The order, which also extends to other sites that mirror the program, was issued in response to a March 15 lawsuit brought against the pair by toy company Mattel, which owns the Framingham, Massachusetts-based software firm that sells CyberPatrol.
According to a March 17 Associated Press story, Mattel claims that the software utility allows children to “bypass their parents’ efforts to screen out inappropriate materials on the Internet.” However, Bennett Haselton, founder of the anti-filtering group Peacefire, asserted in a press release that this information has been widely available for more than a year and a half and that Mattel’s claim was just spin. “They know it would look bad for them,” he said, “if people read that they were suing to stop parents . . . from finding out what CyberPatrol really blocks.”
The program written by Jansson and Skala, who live in Sweden and Canada respectively, shows that CyberPatrol inexplicably blocks all student organizations at Carnegie Mellon University, journalism-related newsgroups, feminism, and the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, according to Wired News.
Posted March 20, 2000.