3W3S Bernard Merialdo, Benoit Huet

3W3S stands for "World Wide Web Safe Surfing Service. The 3W3S project is an european project within the Internet Action Plan. The main partners in this project are Thales Communications, Eurecom and WebWasher Gmd.

Project description

The objective of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of Internet filters which can restrict the access of innocent users to some potentially dangerous web pages (typically to protect minors from pornography, racism and violence). The project aims at simple but efficient tools. The basis of the filtering software is an extension of the WebWasher proxy, which is already widely distributed. The project adds three news functionalities to this proxy:

filtering web pages based on a database (black list) of forbidden URLs.
filtering web pages based on the presence of certain content words in the text (this is a multi-lingual capability, with the possibility of multi-word matching and exception lists).
filtering web pages based on a PICS ratings (if this rating is present, either in the page, on the web server, or available from a service bureau).