North Carolina Library Computer Users Viewing Porn Online Angers Parents
The Greensboro North Carolina News & Record newspaper reported yesterday that local parents are outraged about library users viewing pornography on library computers. In the first six months of this year, 89 people were apparently caught viewing pornography on public computers at the Central Library. In summer 2008 a Greensboro man was caught and arrested for viewing child pornography on a public computer at Central Library. So quite a problem!
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.
