Hardcore About Blocking Porn

Tired of deleting piece after piece of pornographic mail that floods your
inbox on a daily basis at work? After all, it seems you
don’t even have to click on a pornographic link to be battered by naked
images, lascivious come-hithers and racy language — not to
mention the fact that many such links are masked by misleading URLS. However
it shows up, most people agree that work is the worst
place for it to arrive. So how can you deal with it?


That’s where managed service providers such as MessageLabs come into the
picture. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based firm, a provider of
e-mail security services to guard against pesky or deadly bugs or viruses,
claims some 20 percent of e-mail images are of the
pornographic persuasion. This has increasingly become a problem in the
workplace as scores of firms have had to fire employees or
deal with sexual harassment lawsuits, all propagated by porn’s position in
e-mailboxes.


This can only get worse as e-mailboxes, according to market research firm
IDC, are getting fuller and fuller. IDC is projecting that
e-mail traffic in the U.S. will top 9 billion messages per day by the end of
2003, and will balloon from 505 million in 2000 to 1.2
billion in 2005.


Given these facts, MessageLabs has decided to go a step beyond the
traditional anti-virus security (SkyScan AV) it offers to the
enterprise with SkyScan AP (AP as in “anti-porn”) for businesses, created in
conjunction with software developer First 4 Internet.
It’s forged from the same mold as the company’s SkyScan AV solution, but
instead of picking out strains of Nimda or SirCam and
intercepting offending emails at the Internet level, it picks out
pornographic images.


How effective is SkyScan AP? It’s by no means perfect, but MessageLabs
claims tests yielded a 95 percent success rate for SkyScan
AP, as compared to 70 percent effectiveness from other filtering software.
Both the U.K.’s Content Technologies and China’s Xunfei
Information Technology Co. Ltd devised anti-porn software, to name a couple.


SkyScan AP uses patented technology to parse the difference between, say, a
baby in diapers and a fleshy youngster in a compromising
position. This is arguably the most important function of SkyScan AP because
“kiddie porn,” — the slang term affixed to child
pornography — is a no-no across the board. But the tool has other useful
purposes, such as differentiating between nudity in art
versus adult entertainment, and recognizing tricks that pornographers use to
slip images past the radar of other filtering
technologies, such as reverse imaging and color distortion.


How does it work? MessageLabs Technical Manager David White told
InternetNews.com that the service, like all anti-porn tools,
conducts skin tone analyses to determine what flesh may be tasteful and what
may be lurid.


“SkyScan AP uses Image Composition Software (ICA), which decomposes an
image,” White explained. “It runs 22,000 algorithms and in
addition to skin tone textures, it can decipher porn through other features
such as facial expressions.”


On a more broad level, MessageLabs Director of Marketing John Harrington
told InternetNews.com that SkyScan reroutes e-mails to the
company’s global control towers in clusters where scanners armed with the
company’s patented Skeptic technology fish out illicit
materials. SkyScan AP IDs offending e-mails, and subsequently blocks, tags
or redirects them.


“The idea really came from a combination of ideas,” Harrington said. “The
content security market has been growing rapidly what with
everyone’s increased concerns, especially from a corporate standpoint. Then
there are factors such as increased Internet usage. We
have heard from customers who were coming up with a lot of spam and
pornography and decided to create the service based on their
concerns.”


Born from U.K.-based ISP Star Technology Group, MessageLabs launched in the
U.S. in July 2001. The outfit’s customers include Air
Products and Chemicals, Fujitsu and Vodafone.

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