Watch What You Watch (IEEE Spectrum)
Dec 3rd, 2005 by Viviane
By: Steven Cherry
New software scans computers for pornographic images loaded by employees
More than 60 percent of the 500 largest U.S. companies have disciplined or fired employees for displaying, storing, or transmitting pornography or other improper images, according to a survey released last summer by Delta Consulting, in Atlanta. Many firms block access to pornographic Web sites, partly because pornography sent around the workplace can expose companies to sexual harassment lawsuits or charges of permitting a “hostile work environment.” Other firms may limit their employees’ Web surfing to a few preapproved sites.
But those two tactics do nothing to address images brought in as e-mail attachments, or those on CDs and USB storage devices, or, for that matter, MP3 players and cellphones, or those just e-mailed in by friends. PixAlert, a Dublin, Ireland, start-up, claims to be the first with software that can find pornographic digital pictures no matter how they enter the office PC. The program doesn’t try to monitor pornography’s myriad pathways into the workplace. Instead, it relies on the commonsense notion that the images aren’t a problem until they’re viewed, and when they’re viewed they are patterns of pixels onscreen. The right algorithms can analyze those patterns.
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