Hello,
I am new to VB and am trying to make a program that will search all websites that IE/Mozilla loads and look for bad words and then close IE/Mozilla and add the domain name to the hosts file. I don't have a clue how to do this so I need suggestions.

Note, This is to protect children from inappropriate material, it is not to make a virus that blocks antivirus websites.

Zach

Why rebuild the wheel? Just get AOL with parental controls or some Child protection software...

Because AOL sucks? There's other apps though - apparently NetNanny and CyberPatrol are pretty good.

...

I know that AOL has such features but it is very expensive and I their software is hard on the computer, I also know that there are other programs that do this but they are almost always expensive and I would like to make one and release it as freeware, I think that every parent should have this type of programs available.

After a quick search on google, for "Free Parental Controls" it turned up lots, one of them that i looked at was http://softappco.com/H_linternet.html

But if you really want to make your own, I suggest looking into how firewalls work. Google for "intercepting Internet Explorer" and I'm sure you'll find some hacking site with some useful code.

Hiya

If you want to go down the proper commercial filter route, you need to call API to install what is called a "Winsock hook" that allows your program to sit in between network traffic and get the contents of all winsock based (TCP/IP) communication. Whilst complex filters decode all this information up the network stack to the Application Layer (down into HTML etc) all you really need to do is make your program look out for certain strings within the data (i.e. profanity, etc) and drop the offending packet - these pages would just show a "page could not be displayed" error. Planesourcecode would be a good place to look, or Google. As ooble said, this would be a form of firewalling, although the programming may well turn out to be very complex (you would need several stacks - one for each connection in fact) and more suited to a language like C.

The alternative would be to write and Internet Explorer plugin that searches for phrases and blocks pages accordingly. On this there is undoubtedly a vast plethora of information available. I would actually start on MSDN or the KB and not google as there would be far too much information, including rubbish, advertising NetNanny etc.

The disadvantage with the second method would be that it would only work in IE and dependent technologies (outlook and AOL). Netscape for instance would be unaffected, and unless you're willing to write a plugin for every single browser on the planet, it would be unrealistic to expect 100% effectiveness.

Hope this is of some use.

More...
 

Sorry...
As I clicked submit a third idea popped into my head.

There are ways of actually searching the contents of IE windows as a string, i.e. using instr() and the closewindow API. This searching could be done using window messages, getwindowtext or whatever. The official Microsoft-friendly way would be to use DDE. I don't know much about this - I've used it before for controlling Excel from my application, however it seems to be an old and somewhat obsolete technology, though I'm sure a quick Google will bring up loads. Also Instr() is sufficiently quick that you wouldn't need to create a "blacklist" as such.