New computer program ’sniffs out’ porn

New computer program ’sniffs out’ porn

Jeff Johnson – OneNewsNow – 7/25/2008 11:00:00 AMvar addthis_pub = ‘onenewsnow’;

A new tool available to parents and business owners should help cut down on children and employees accessing pornography on their computers.

For years, the two most effective means of blocking porn from computers has been filtering software and firewalls. “Those are great. They create a great wall that protects people from accidental exposure or people who are not looking for pornography,” says Matthew Yarrow of SurfRecon.com. “But if you have an individual who’s actually seeking pornography, a firewall or a filter can actually amount to as little as a speed bump in their ability to get out to the Internet and access stuff.”

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Yarrow says SurfRecon.com is now adding another level of protection. They have created a database of the digital fingerprints of millions of pornographic images that their software can “sniff out” on a computer or network on demand.

“The software will start ‘crawling’ the computer system. Every time it comes across an image file it’ll contact our database and say, ‘What is this?’ And if we have that already categorized, it’ll pop up in a category for you saying, ‘Hey! We just scanned this computer.  There were 10,000 image files and 750 of them were pornography,’” he explains.

The software also blurs uncategorized image thumbnails so that an individual does not have to view the porn to determine whether someone has used that computer to view it. Users can also flag uncategorized porn they find and add it to the company’s database, which is updated continuously.

“There’s a bunch of different ways to access pornographic content that has nothing to do with the Internet now — and our tool helps parents kind of bypass those sneaky efforts to access and hide people’s habits and know what’s going on a computer system,” Yarrow explains.

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