Cyber-Patrol (was:"Privacy"-discussion)

[Ulrich Babiak]

Hi all,

(for the impatient: there is a technical question regarding
 the functionality of CyberPatrol at the end of this posting ...)

it was quite amazing for me to read the discussion about privacy
issues for internet users in public areas. Most of you do have
a different slant on this than we have here in Germany. 

As we in Cologne are the first *public* library in Germany with
a professional internet connection for user access we are also the
first to encounter all the well-known problems of users accessing
questionable material. Personally, I find it hard to decide about
the priorities - freedom of information vs. filtering. However,
it's not me who has to decide about our library's policy - those
who are in charge have finally voted for applying filter software.
This deceision is not really surprising, because in Germany librarians
seem to see themselves as the keepers of "higher culture" and in
many discussions I heard the argument that libraries have to guide
their users (which is, in fact, a judgement that there is "good"
and "bad" information out there, and accessing the latter in the
library would be a waste of tax money and library resources). 

Alright, philosophical issues aside, here's the bottom line:
I have been asked to set up filtering software for our Win95 
user PCs. For various reasons, I thought that CyberPatrol would
be suitable for our library, but it doesn't seem to work correctly.
I had an extensive EMail exchange with their tech-support but
they were not able to  fix it. I suspect it has to do with
the fact that is not a Win95 application, but under certain conditions
there are no problems even under Win95. 
Then again, on our public PCs (Win95 in an NT Network, Windows installed
locally on the workstations) Netscape crashes every time CP is loaded.

Has anyone had similar problems? I would especially be interested
in experiences with CP in a networked environment. How stable is it?

Thank you,

Ulrich



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Ulrich Babiak             |       Buero  ubabiak at stbib-koeln.de   
Dipl.-Netzer :-)          |       privat ubabiak at dom.de
StadtBibliothek Koeln     |       http://www.dom.de/FreiRaum/uli/ub.html
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