Filtering question...

[cheredenine]

Apologies if i'm covering ground already covered, but i'm playing catchup here after returning from paternity leave and have a pile of things to get sorted!

 

We've had an issue in the past few days with our kids accessing a porn site. The site wasn't picked up by our LEA's generally quite effective filtering and this has caused our headteacher some concern. Whilst we realise 100% accurate filtering isn't possible, the head is keen to look at more effective solutions. It looks as though the site was created using a freebie domain name by one of our pupils and was sufficiently devoid of content apart from pictures not to flag up any keywords, etc...

 

So... What filtering do you good people use and how flexible is it? I've heard of products that evaluate how much of an image is skin tones and filters accordingly and, whilst this is something i think the head would be interested in, i'm not sure if we're talking huge sums of money to aquire..

 

Cheers!

[tom_newton]

This is an area i've got a lot of interest in.

I always say, as soon as a company brings out an image filter that is:

1. Fast (and by this i mean fast enough for an edge device, not desktop)

2. Accurate - even 90% is not good enough when we are talking fase positives

3. Value for money - we're chasing edge cases here, it should not cost the earth

 

..at this point we will add that to our arsenal.

Anyway - I haven't found it yet.

 

I should imagine the best way to hunt down well-hidden student sites is to keep an eye on logs and reporting.

[dhicks]

It looks as though the site was created using a freebie domain name by one of our pupils and was sufficiently devoid of content apart from pictures not to flag up any keywords, etc.

 

How were they caught? Was the site the pupil hosted an actual image-hosting site or did they set up a proxy which then let them access other sites? I suppose you could have a filtering engine produce a very small thumbnail of each image it comes accross and shovle them all in to a single page for someone to visually check periodically - the human eye is still probably the best tool for quickly spotting dodgy material.

 

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David Hicks