Anti-porn software frustrates office 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 that 70 per cent of pornography is downloaded in office hours, while analyst IDC has said that 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 in September, offering end users extra security to combat unsuitable web-based graphical content.

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

"The developers' kit allows resellers to customise the software. This gives them scope to sell different propositions and have product differentiation. For example, an advertising agency or lingerie vendor will 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 resellers an added-value proposition."

Also published in Computer Reseller News