While I can understand that access to undesirable content may be a real
concern for parents who don't won't their kids to surf in dirty waters, I
find that trying to control adults is not the right thing to do.
Yes, the prinipal motivation in giving internet access to employees is that
they use it for the real work.
but instead of controlling and/or spying employees, you'd better talk to
them, consider them as adults (they're supposed to be adults, no?) and
respect their decisions. People are what they are, don't loose your energy
in controlling them as if they were irresponsible.
You should instead concentrate on three things: hire 'good' people, do
everything to keep them, fire 'bad' people.
'good' laws don't make 'good' societies (moreover, what is 'good' and what
gives you the right to decide what's good for others).
you don't like porn? so, do what you can to avoid it, for yourself.
If an employee does a good job and successfully handles his tasks, then if
he likes porn, than what? he's free with his life.
when you suspect an employee of spending his time doing fun stuff instead of
working, that's another problem. he could as well surf on the ietf draft
pages or learning html5 or so. the result for the company is the same: the
guy is not doing his job. so the problem is not what he is doing instead of
working, but that he is not working. and that is the problem to address.
When faced with problems, there are two ways to hanle them:
- don't try to understand, state laws and policies, draw lines, ... this
method doesn't solve the problem. it simply hides it or "move" it
- try to understand the situation, check your real objectives, and make all
your efforts to find the shortest path from where you are to where you wanna
be.
This seems trivial, but practice shows people find it easier to use
"incorrect" methods. Probably because people do not feel confortable
handling "human" problems and prefer to address "formal models" (that's what
they learn at school, anyway).
another question to ask is that why are there more and more porn sites. The
only realistic answer is that people like to
look at their content. I am not saying people are perverse. there are many
justifiable reasons. curiosity is one. "fashion" is anoter one (if a friend
tell you "heh, that site is having a complete nude jpeg of zzzz (replace
with your favourite actress/actor/...)", what would you do?).
back to technicalities!
there are many approaches that may be used to "try" to do the requested
filtering.
a first approach is to parse the content and "grep" bad words. There are
many problems with this aproach.
The first is you can end with denying access to "good" sites. what are you
gonna say to sussex university?
how will you browse medical pages for informations on sexual stuff?
on the other hand, how can you parse encrypted text? even if you decide to
deny ssl and the such, one can use any conversion by just setting up an
internal proxy. how are you gonna handle anonymsers? moreover, when such
solution will e widely used, believe me, porn sites will contain no word
known by these programs! (for example, they may use "ppoorrnn" instead of
"porn"...).
a second approach is to deny access to specific sites based on a black is
mechanism such as that used against spam.
The problem is that there'll be more and more sites and you have to stay
tuned. a lot of work!
the list may be a public one (like the RBL).
but is all that worth the pain? in my opinion, no...
...except if I work for a company that makes such filtering software!
regards,
mouss
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