DansGuardian is an Open Source web content filter software. currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris. It filters the actual content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, PICS filtering and URL filtering. It does not purely filter based on a banned list of sites like lesser totally commercial filters.
Content Filtering:
Your normal web filter such as Cyber Patrol, squidGuard, Net Nanny, etc, has a very large list of bad sites. If you try to go to these sites you will get blocked. I.e. your web access is filtered by web address.
The web is a fast changing place and even large web search engines such as Google or Altavista or Yahoo don't even know of half of it. This makes filtering by web address (URL) difficult as sites change and new ones come up all the time. It is impossible to have comprehensive filtering using just URLs. What is needed is something to check every page you (or your children) ever access for 'bad' subjects such as drugs, profanities, hate, pornography, etc, and disallow it if it's not suitable. This is called 'Content Filtering'.
This is why you need DansGuardian as it makes the web a cleaner, safer, place for you and your children.
As a side effect, DansGuardian also helps maintain freedom of speech by moving the censoring to the choice of the individual rather than imposing a specific ideal on the whole world.
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