[techtalk] Sick of surf and porn addicts

[Paul Hardacre]

At 11:58 25/05/2001, Liese wrote:

>Hi,

<snip>

>And we are not allowed to step up to a user and say "hey, our logs show 
>that last month you've been surfing porn sites for over 20 hours, you must 
>stop this", or "We've noticed you have about 100MB of pornography 
>attachments on your drive, you are wasting important bandwidth". This is 
>against the law because it is a violation of privacy ( i live in 
>belgium/europe)
>
>Is there anybody who has been in the same position and found a way to 
>control it better, the legal way.. I could press charges, saying that i - 
>as a woman - feel sexualy offended by some of the things i come across 
>when fixing some of the computerproblems. But I'm afraid of the 
>consequences, there should be another way, without making it a personal 
>vendetta.

Not really wanting to plug any commercial products but it does sound like 
the only way would be to stick in some sort of filtering proxy that uses 
content-based filtering.. I've not come across any for squid myself but the 
company I work for was looking at a product called SurfControl for a short 
while. It works a bit like CyberPatrol, NetNanny and the like but obviously 
it's for business. I had a quick look on their website just now 
(www.surfcontrol.com) and they also have an email filter which may be of 
use to you too.. Trouble is it only runs with MS Proxy, Checkpoint 
Firewall, etc.. :/ But it looks like it could suit your needs.. :/ We had 
it set up here to sit between our network and the squid proxy, was quite 
effective too..

There may be a linux alternative but I've not come across one :(

Hope that's of some use to you,

Paul