Most of the debate and controversy around the Act so far has been focused on home users, but UK organisations also need to ensure that they are taking steps to prevent illegal downloads by their users.

“Organisations may have assumed that the Act only applies to residential customers, however the Act applies to any broadband subscriber including businesses, schools, colleges and universities,” said Stephen Clark, Solicitor and member of the Intellectual Property group at commercial law firm MBM Commercial LLP. “Organisations who, knowingly or otherwise, allow their IT resources to be used to download copyright material could face the same penalties as a residential customer, including degradation of service, bandwidth limitation or account suspension.”

You can read Bloxx’s full press release.

So does your organisation have adequate technology and processes in place to ensure that users are not able to download copyright material? Here are a few key points that you need to ensure.

• Do you have an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) in place that covers the downloading of copyrighted material and the consequences for doing this?
• Are users aware of the AUP and are they frequently reminded of its existence?
• Have you a Web filter in place that can block access to P2P applications and websites that might contain copyright material? Is the Web filter configured to prevent the downloading of media files – MP3, MPG, AVI etc?
• Have you restricted access at your firewall to ports that are specifically required for business applications?
• Are your client machines locked down to prevent users from installing P2P or downloading applications and tools?

It will be interesting to see what happens when Ofcom finalise their processes for dealing with downloaders and how they will deal with the stated resistance of the ISPs to the Act. Nonetheless, organisations will not be immune from prosecution and it will be intriguing to watch how things develop over the next few months.

This is an extremely controversial area and one that’s likely to provoke a huge amount of debate.

If the intent of the Australian filtering is to eliminate illegal content i.e. content that is criminally obscene, content that incites religious or racial hatred or content related to terrorism, then I would imagine that the vast majority of Australian Internet users would accept that.

The real concern is the filtering goes beyond that and becomes state censorship. It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to legislate against this.

From a technology perspective, with over 80% of the Internet being uncategorised, the challenge for the Australian Government is huge and if implemented, there’s likely to be performance issues and problems with under- and over-blocking of specific web pages.

This will be especially true if they are relying on a database of pre-catagorised web sites and pages. This approach can only filter a tiny percentage of the available web pages. For example, if a new web site is created that the Australian Government would require to be filtered, then it could be many months before the site is catagorised,

Bloxx Web Filtering on the other hand uses advanced software techniques to accurately analyze and catagorise web pages at the point of request and is the only available web filter that scales with the growth of the web.

The views expressed in this comment are my own personal opinion and do not represent the views and opinions of Bloxx.

At the heart of our content filtering appliance is Tru-View Technology (TVT), a real-time content analysis and categorisation engine that accurately classifies a web page at the point of request and then applies the appropriate filtering policy.

TVT is now available as an OEM Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows other web filtering companies to quickly create real-time categorisation capability.

So why are we doing this?

The focus over the last few years has moved away from web filtering products products that provided URL content filtering to delivering broader web security products, where content filtering was a component. Indeed, according to Gartner, the URL filtering market is stagnant and all content filters now do an excellent job of categorising web content.

Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager for Cisco Security stated recently that 1 billion new web pages are created every day and that 80% of the Web is not categorised.

Now web security companies are waking up to the fact that delivering a product that only covers 20% of the Web presents a significant security, productivity and reputational risk for customers and it is only going to get worse.

If you check most of the web filtering vendors’ websites you will find that they say they already do real-time content categorisation. So what’s the point of licensing TVT?

The reality is that this appears to be mostly marketing hype - when we have taken a closer look at other “real-time” categorisation technologies, its usually best effort keyword analysis on the appliance or in the cloud, then sent on for manual categorisation if the page can’t be categorised.

We will be happy to talk to any web security companies out there who want to find out more information.

Read more in Bloxx’s original Press Release.

“We are pleased to add this depth of experience and industry knowledge to the management team at this crucial phase of the company’s growth,” said Eamonn Doyle, Chief Executive Officer at Bloxx. “With continued strong sales in Web filtering and a great response to the recently launched Media Filter, we are now looking to further expand our reseller roster in the UK and EMEA and we believe that Pat will help us to quickly develop and execute this strategy.”

You can read the full press release here and if you want to find out more about becoming a Bloxx reseller contact us now or fill in our Partner Enquiry form.

The council will be deploying Media Filter to schools in its area to help them take advantage of YouTube media content in a secure online environment, improve local collaborative learning and resource sharing and give autonomy to teachers to help them enrich learning experiences through the use of approved, age rated online media.

“We had a real dilemma on our hands: our schools were demanding access to YouTube, but due to the inappropriate content and user submitted comments which can sometimes be found on the site, it was impossible to allow access in a safe and controlled way,” said Phil Brockbank, Technical Consultant at Bolton Council. “The Bloxx Media Filter will allow us to empower teachers to create and use a free online library of rich learning resources, students will be happier as lessons will be more engaging and enjoyable and the council will be able to deliver on its commitment to keeping our children and young people safer online.”

To find out  more about Bloxx Media Filter and how it can help you get all of the educational benefits of YouTube without the risks you can read the datasheet here

The Bloxx Media Filter lets teachers quickly identify curriculum related YouTube video clips and with just a few clicks tag, assign these to a subject area and age range and submit the clips for approval. Once approved, students can easily search and view clips which are streamed directly from the YouTube site through the appliance directly to classroom PCs, without related video clips, contextual advertising or user submitted comments being displayed.

YouTube has been one of the biggest Internet success stories. Launched in 2005, the company was acquired by Google in 2006 for US $1.65 billion. An estimated 65,000 video clips are uploaded to the site every day and the site is now one of the most popular sites on the Web and is currently the eighth most popular website visited by 6-11 year olds.

There’s a huge range of content available on YouTube but a large percentage of this content is not suitable for use in education. There have been well documented incidents of extremely bad content appearing on YouTube, including the site being flooded with pornographic videos last May. In the last few years YouTube has also gained notoriety for hosting videos of happy-slapping, street violence, joy-riding and pupil and teacher bullying.

In addition, comments posted by users on videos will often contain extremely offensive language – even if the content of the video itself is harmless.

Despite these issues, YouTube now has a substantial and growing amount of content that could be an extremely valuable learning resource, helps improve student engagement and has a positive impact on learning outcomes.

Due to the complex way that YouTube media is stored and disseminated, filtering YouTube content is virtually impossible using traditional Web content filters and until now ICT managers have only been able to allow or block access to the entire YouTube site. If a school decides to allow access to YouTube then they cannot allow access to just specific video clips – it’s all or nothing.

The Bloxx Media Filter eliminates the need for IT managers to allow students access to the entire YouTube site, which could allow students to inadvertently view inappropriate content. Since only approved and age rated video clips can be viewed, this eliminates the risk of students viewing inappropriate material or comments.

Media Filter uses Active Stream Filtering to extract the required URL and in conjunction with the submission and approval processes, ensures that only approved media content can be viewed by users.

To read more about Media Filter download the Media Filter Datasheet.

“Bloxx is delighted to be listed in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 again,” says Bloxx CEO, Eamonn Doyle. “Being listed in Deloitte’s Fast 500 and Fast 50 for three consecutive years is a fantastic achievement for Bloxx and demonstrates how our outstanding products, hard work and loyal customer base have driven our growth and allowed us to maintain a strong position in a market that is extremely competitive.”

“Making the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA ranking is a testament to a company’s commitment to technology,” David Halstead, partner in charge of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 EMEA program. “With its 965.79% growth rate over five years, Bloxx has proven that its leadership has the vision and determination to grow in difficult conditions.”

This growth has been driven largely by the company’s patent pending software, Tru-View Technology that has revolutionized the web filtering market. The Bloxx Web Filtering appliances, powered by Tru-View Technology, analyses and categorizes web pages in real-time at the point of request. To find out more about Tru-View Technology.

The Library has now installed a traffic shaping system which they claim  identifies pornography sites as well as other categories of websites and then limits the bandwidth on any streaming media to such an extents that the session will time out.

One particular section of the article was interesting:

“It’s not filtering it,” said Tommy Joseph, manager of technology and reference at the library. “It’s discouraging it.”

One of the difficulties of filters, Joseph said, is that they limit access to research. For example, the explicit, now-defunct porn site whitehouse.com was just a few keystrokes away from the official site, whitehouse.gov.

Conversely, a filter could prevent someone from retrieving legitimate research detailing breast self-examination techniques, for example, or prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

Over- and under-blocking are certainly a problem for first- and second-generation content filters that rely on a URL database of web sites and keyword scanning and scoring.

However, the Bloxx Web Filtering appliances use third-generation technology that performs advanced contextual language analysis to analyze and categorize web pages at the point-of-request. That pretty much eliminates the problem of over- and under-blocking.

To find out more about you can download a useful whitepaper on Web filtering technology.  Understand more about how Bloxx’s Web Filtering appliances analyze and categorize web pages in real-time.

We saw a report last week from Morse, and to add to the debate Bloxx has announced the results of research we carried out last month with IT Managers in the UK.

We were surprised to find that 90% of IT Managers survey would like an outright ban or restrictions placed on Social Networking in the workplace with 35% wanting a complete ban. Productivity, security risks and corporate reputation were the top reasons cited as the biggest concerns.

Reading some of the comments in the report would suggest that the debate on the pros and cons of Social Networking in the workplace still has a long way to go.

Read the results of the Social Networking survey and you if you want to find out more information about how to develop a strategic approach to Social Networking in the workplace you can download a useful whitepaper.

However, the number one position was grabbed by financial planning and sales technology company Distribution Technology with a jaw dropping 18225%  growth. Congratulations!

Read more about the Fast 50 Awards and to read Bloxx’s press release on its Fast 50 award win.