A blow to office porn surfers

Pornography is costing companies millions of pounds in lost productivity, according to recent reports.

Pornography is costing companies millions of pounds in lost productivity, according to recent reports.

Porn-watcher Sextracker has claimed 70 per cent of pornography is downloaded in office hours, while analyst IDC has said 30 to 40 per cent of staff internet activity is not business-related.

In a bid to tackle the problem, software developer First for Internet (F4i) is to launch version 2.0 of its Image Composition Analysis (ICA) software by September, offering end-users extra security to combat unsuitable web-based graphical content.

Independent software testing company TesCom said ICA blocked 95 per cent of a sample of 3000 pornographic images, scanning at 20 images per second.

"The software developers' kit allows resellers to customise the software. This gives VARs scope to sell different propositions and have product differentiation. "For example, an advertising agency or lingerie vendor may not want to block pictures of its models," said George Macdonald, sales and marketing director at F4i.

Mark Sunner, chief technical officer at email filtering firm MessageLabs, said: "We get three million emails a day. Five per cent of those have images attached, and 30 per cent of the images are pornographic.

"By integrating ICA into our email filtering software, we give VARs an added-value proposition."