Updated 21 May, 2012, 5:50 pm IST

Drishti Builds 'Plug n Play' Porn Filter

11 Jun, 2007, 3:30 pm IST | by Priyanka Pradhan |

Hyderabad based IT research company, Drishti Systems, has developed the first statistical pornographic filter. The plug n play hardware device blocks all pornographic content in a network within websites, emails, documents, blogs or other community websites such as Google groups and Yahoo groups among others.

According to Drishti Systems, "Several sites offer 'free' porn content, while many also offer Dialers, Emails, Chat Rooms, etc. with explicit content. In context of the misuse of net at workplaces, it is estimated that sixty-two percent of employees (US) surf for sexually explicit materials and seventy percent of all Internet porn traffic occurs during working hours."

The six year old Hyderabad-based Company has launched NetOptima N101, along with 'the world's first porn-filtered broadband service,' Drishti Broadband. NetOptima N101 is a dedicated hardware platform, unlike the parental control software generally available in the market. Based on Pattern based filtering method, the NetOptima N101 analyzes the web page while it is being loaded for pre-defined patterns and blocks pornographic content. NetOptima uses patented (pending) algorithms to statistically identify the document based on various characteristics of the page, in addition to keyword distribution, frequency and multi-word patterns.

Anil K. Chandra, Head, R&D of Drishti Systems said, "NetOptima N101 provides an effective way for IT and security managers to deter the abuse of Internet privileges. Targeted at Educational Institutes (schools, colleges, universities, training institutes), Corporate & Government organizations and ISPs, NetOptima N101 is priced at Rs.65,000 per device. There are no additional subscription charges. One device can optimally support about 500 computers surfing the net. This device is ideally suited to schools, colleges, institutions and corporate houses."

NetOptima will block only the pages that contain pornographic material and not the entire website. It also blocks P2P (peer-to-peer) traffic, services such as eDonkey, eMule, KaZaA, FastTrack, Gnutella, Direct Connect, BitTorrent, Extended BT, SoulSeek, etc. Ported on MIPS32 266 MHz with 32 MB memory, N101 can filter peak of 4 mbps and average of 2 mbps bandwidth.

Tags: porn filter