Information Technology
welcome to my space

Tired of deleting piece after piece of pornographic mail that floods your inbox on a daily basis at work? After all, it seems you don't even have to click on a pornographic link to be battered by naked images, lascivious come-hithers and racy language -- not to mention the fact that many such links are masked by misleading URLS. However it shows up, most people agree that work is the worst place for it to arrive. So how can you deal with it?

That's where managed service providers such as MessageLabs come into the picture. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based firm, a provider of e-mail security services to guard against pesky or deadly bugs or viruses, claims some 20 percent of e-mail images are of the pornographic persuasion. This has increasingly become a problem in the workplace as scores of firms have had to fire employees or deal with sexual harassment lawsuits, all propagated by porn's position in e-mailboxes.

This can only get worse as e-mailboxes, according to market research firm IDC, are getting fuller and fuller. IDC is projecting that e-mail traffic in the U.S. will top 9 billion messages per day by the end of 2003, and will balloon from 505 million in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2005.

Given these facts, MessageLabs has decided to go a step beyond the traditional anti-virus security (SkyScan AV) it offers to the enterprise with SkyScan AP (AP as in "anti-porn") for businesses, created in conjunction with software developer First 4 Internet. It's forged from the same mold as the company's SkyScan AV solution, but instead of picking out strains of Nimda or SirCam and intercepting offending emails at the Internet level, it picks out pornographic images.

How effective is SkyScan AP? It's by no means perfect, but MessageLabs claims tests yielded a 95 percent success rate for SkyScan AP, as compared to 70 percent effectiveness from other filtering software. Both the U.K.'s Content Technologies and China's Xunfei Information Technology Co. Ltd devised anti-porn software, to name a couple.

SkyScan AP uses patented technology to parse the difference between, say, a baby in diapers and a fleshy youngster in a compromising position. This is arguably the most important function of SkyScan AP because "kiddie porn," -- the slang term affixed to child pornography -- is a no-no across the board. But the tool has other useful purposes, such as differentiating between nudity in art versus adult entertainment, and recognizing tricks that pornographers use to slip images past the radar of other filtering technologies, such as reverse imaging and color distortion.

How does it work? MessageLabs Technical Manager David White told InternetNews.com that the service, like all anti-porn tools, conducts skin tone analyses to determine what flesh may be tasteful and what may be lurid.

"SkyScan AP uses Image Composition Software (ICA), which decomposes an image," White explained. "It runs 22,000 algorithms and in addition to skin tone textures, it can decipher porn through other features such as facial expressions."

On a more broad level, MessageLabs Director of Marketing John Harrington told InternetNews.com that SkyScan reroutes e-mails to the company's global control towers in clusters where scanners armed with the company's patented Skeptic technology fish out illicit materials. SkyScan AP IDs offending e-mails, and subsequently blocks, tags or redirects them.

"The idea really came from a combination of ideas," Harrington said. "The content security market has been growing rapidly what with everyone's increased concerns, especially from a corporate standpoint. Then there are factors such as increased Internet usage. We have heard from customers who were coming up with a lot of spam and pornography and decided to create the service based on their concerns."

Born from U.K.-based ISP Star Technology Group, MessageLabs launched in the U.S. in July 2001. The outfit's customers include Air Products and Chemicals, Fujitsu and Vodafone.