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DansGuardian is a content control system, primarily authored by Daniel Barron, the technical director of SmoothWall Ltd. It is distributed under the GPL, and written in C++. It primarily runs in Linux and other free Unices. It is entirely command line and web-based, and meant to be used in conjunction with a web proxy such as Squid. It is actively maintained; the last stable version is 2.8.0.6, released 2005-08-13, while the latest beta version is 2.9.8.1, released 2006-12-08. In the United States, DansGuardian satisfies the requirements of Children's Internet Protection Act.
DansGuardian has multiple configurable methods of deciding whether or not to show a specific web page. It can use an advanced phrase weighting system to reduce over or under blocking, block based on URL blacklists, and block content based on the PICS code in the document. The program can use phrase lists (keywords) and URL block lists provided in plain text format, such as the one provided by a URLBlacklist.com which provides, on subscription basis, URL lists for DansGuardian and SquidGuard. DansGuardian also ships with a workable phrase list. See the [http://dansguardian.org/?page=introduction introduction] page on the official web site for more information about filtering methods used.
DansGuardian is one of the few widely used filtering/censorware systems that makes its source code available, thus avoiding some of the criticisms associated with censorware proxies being "black box" systems.
Two closed-source versions of DansGuardian exist; SmoothGuardian is a plug-in for SmoothWall Corporate Server Firewall, and Corporate Guardian is a stand-alone product.
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