Bess is censorware. It is censorware invented by a company called N2H2 which has real live people decide which sites get blocked and which don't. It is not a keyword filtering censorware, like most of the others out there, and it is used on a proxy server to do filtering for an entire network.

Of course like every other piece of censorware out there it doesn't work like its supposed to. It does do keyword filtering at some point because It will block out searches for inapropriate words and url's. It also block's site like peacefire.org which has no inapropriate content what so ever except that it is against censorware.

It was also set up with K-12 students in mind and so when used on College and Corporate networks it makes the users annoyed.

Bess can be bypassed quite easily. Simply find a free proxy server and enter it in your Internet Settings. If this doesn't work, you can try a web based cgi proxy. These are available easily (try searching for "proxy bypass script" on altavista). Unfortunately, they wont work on free servers because most free servers do not allow cgi scripts to make outgoing connections to external servers.

A Chesapeake Bay Retriever owned by N2H2's creator and former CEO Peter Nickerson, and the namesake of the company's original flagship product.

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