BarEleazar
From WorkCDN
BarEleazar is to fill a need for free and flexible browsing accountability software. Similar projects include X3Watch and Covenant Eyes -- both great programs, but both distinctly lacking in a few particular areas (such as Linux support). This is a tentative project to try and contribute a tool to assist Christians who desire greater purity in their online experiences.
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The Parlance
It's a working name, not sure if we'll keep it. "Bar" means "son of", and "Eleazar" was a son of Aaron the high priest. If you're curious about which of Eleazar's sons this program is referring, feel free to look it up.
The Problem
Through the internet, pornography, gambling, and other addictive habits are easier to indulge in than ever before. Internet browsing is often anonymous and lacking accountability.
The Proposal
You can't fix sin in your life by installing a program or even saying a magical incantation. The Holy Spirit is who starts a person's heart on the road of sanctification, and you can't force that on anyone -- that's between them and God.
However, for those who are on the road, we provide a tool that can help us avoid the tempters along the way. To walk along the road blindly is to parody the foolish young man in Proverbs 7, who is led down to the temptress's den like a lamb to slaughter. Rather, we want to be wise and wary, and place guards up to help us flee from things that will do us harm.
One of the best guards that God gives us to keep us from hurting ourselves is Christian fellowship -- brothers and sisters who are committed to standing beside us and strengthening us in our time of need. This program is to facilitate Christian support accountability for a person's Internet-browsing.
The Particulars
BarEleazar is a software program that runs transparently in the background of your computer. It is cross-platform, and supports Windows, MacOSX and Linux. It monitors web traffic (HTTP, FTP, IRC, P2P, chat, etc) and notifies accountability partners if anything is amiss.
It has a flexible plugin architecture, so that the program can be tailored to fit a person's needs, and it encourages 3rd party development. This will let people install detection modules to do things like:
- Monitor P2P traffic (BitTorrent, Kazaa, Limewire, or any other protocol that comes down the pike)
- Monitor chat sessions
- Track visited websites
- Snoop HTTP POST requests for search terms and the text of clicked links
- Detect when program circumvention is attempted.
- Track anything that is available through a packet sniffer
Each tracked piece of data will have scores associated with it, and those scores are affected again by modules.
- Track based on website heading / content / domain keywords
- Compare URLs against blacklists
- Adjust score based on time of day
- Adjust score based on user-confessed "trigger" sites that they want particular attention paid to
- Adjust based on any other criteria one can think of
Each scored track point is then weighed and the information is then organized and presented to the accountability partners in a variety of ways (again controlled via plugins)
- All browsing logs are stored online for perusal by partners with the appropriate login credentials
- All hits above a moderate score are included in a summary e-mail (to be sent out with varying frequency).
- Very high hits can be sent out via more urgent e-mails, or even other mechanisms such as chat (or automated phone calls).
The Process
This is all still in the planning stage, but some code has been written for prototypes of concepts, so the idea is not completely smoke-and-mirrors. If you would like to help see this project reach fruition by volunteering (or even would like to say how you think the software could be made useful for you), please contact HanClinto (hanclinto at gmail dot com).
More Information
- Original Google Spreadsheets Design Thoughts
- Driftnet - Inspired by EtherPEG, Driftnet is a program which listens to network traffic and picks out images from TCP stream
