| 摘要 |
The invention provides a modem having an intelligent interface with a telephone line or fibre optic port, for monitoring the communication between a user's PC or interactive television and the Internet, and regulating Internet access based on the results of that monitoring. A list of prohibited words and optionally a list of permitted words is held in memory. Text sent from the PC/TV to the WWW is compared first with the words in the first list and then with words in the second list. If the outgoing text includes one or more prohibited words, the connection to the WWW is aborted for example by the generation of a control sequence of ASCII characters at the modem. If the outgoing text includes no permitted words, then the text header of information transmitted from the Internet site to the PC/TV via the modem is monitored, and the connection to the specified Internet site is terminated before display at the PC/TV of the text and/or graphic information from that site. When the monitored outgoing text contains one or more words contained in the list of permitted words, then there is no monitoring of the text header from the Internet site. The modem provides a reliable source of protection against the deliberate or inadvertent display of information from undesirable Internet sites.
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