“An increasing number of teens are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the web,” CNet’s Stafanie Olsen wrote.
Anti-adult groups often raise the argument that content filters don’t work as justification for pushing legislation to regulate or ban adult content.
“If you look at what's happened over the last 10 years, Internet pornography has grown exponentially, and Internet filtering has not had a tremendous effect on the problem,” Brandon Cotter, founder of NetAccountability, said.
Kids often tap into the growing number of web proxy sites such as Proxify, Guardster.com and Proxy.org that enable them access sites without tipping off filters, prompting engineers at web-filtering software companies to target such sites.
“A far more difficult problem to deal with is when they download a piece of software on their home computer, using a CGI script to [access content],” Kevin Sanders, a software engineer at Lightspeed Systems, maker of Total Traffic Control, said. “Our product doesn’t recognize it as a known domain, because it's just going through their home computer.”
But proxies are just one of many tricks today’s tech-savvy kids use to get past filters, from downloadable applications like Hidemyass.com that help teens circumvent content filters (and hide any evidence of their activity) to translation sites like Babelfish, where they can look up foreign spellings of raunchy words that filters are unlikely to recognize.