CensorNet Joins the Internet Watch Foundation

CensorNet, an internet security company, has become an associate member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to help combat child sexual abuse sites and criminally obscene content, provide mechanisms for its users to report illegal content and to provide protection against this type of content in its products.

Bristol, United Kingdom (PRWEB) October 22, 2008 -- CensorNet, an internet security company, has become an associate member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to help combat child sexual abuse sites and criminally obscene content, provide mechanisms for its users to report illegal content and to provide protection against this type of content in its products.

CensorNet offers web filtering solutions to the private, public and education sectors as well as offering bespoke filtering platforms for Internet Service Providers.

The IWF is the UK internet 'Hotline' for the public to report their inadvertent exposure to online child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world, criminally obscene content and incitement to racial hatred hosted in the UK.

Tim Lloyd, Founder and Managing Director of CensorNet Ltd said, "We are very pleased to join the IWF. This is an important partnership for us and our clients and further demonstrates our commitment to protecting our customers, many of whom are educational institutes, and their users from illegal content. It also provides us with the opportunity to assist the IWF with their efforts which in turn makes the Internet a safer place for everyone."

IWF helps internet service providers and hosting companies to combat abuse of their networks through a national 'notice and take-down' service and provides unique data to law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad to assist investigations into the distributers of potentially illegal online content. As a result of this partnership approach, less than 1% of child sexual abuse content, known to the IWF, has been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997. As sexually abusive images of children are primarily hosted abroad, IWF also facilitates the industry-led initiative to protect users from inadvertent exposure to this content by blocking access to it through the provision of a dynamic list of child sexual abuse URLs.

Peter Robbins OBE, QPM, Chief Executive of the IWF, said: "We are delighted to welcome CensorNet as a member of the Internet Watch Foundation. The support of the online sector is vital for the IWF to continue its work combating child sexual abuse content online and we look forward to working in partnership with CensorNet to protect internet users and promote a safer online experience."

About CensorNet Ltd:
CensorNet Ltd is an independent vendor that provides extremely flexible, accurate and powerful Internet filtering solutions to a wide range of organisations spanning many different market sectors, from small business and education to healthcare and government. The CensorNet technology includes a comprehensive database of over 60 million web sites, real-time content classification in over 15 languages and sophisticated image filtering. Currently, CensorNet is protecting over 1 million end-users.

For further information, please visit http://www.censornet.com or telephone +44 (0) 845 230 9590.

About IWF:
IWF works in partnership with the online industry, law enforcement, government, the education sector, charities, international partners and the public to minimise the availability of potentially illegal online content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

We are an independent self-regulatory body, funded by the EU and the wider online industry, including internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers, content service providers, filtering companies, search providers, trade associations and the financial sector as well as other organisations that support us for corporate social responsibility reasons.

We work with UK government to influence initiatives developed to combat online abuse and this dialogue goes beyond the UK and Europe to ensure greater awareness of global issues, trends and responsibilities. We work internationally with INHOPE and other relevant authorities and organisations to encourage wider adoption of good practice in combating online child sexual abuse content and to promote inclusive and united global responses to this dynamic, cross-border criminality.

We strive to create continued awareness of the role and purpose of the IWF and aim to foster trust and reassurance in the internet for current and future users. Our self-regulatory partnership approach is widely recognised as an effective model in combating the abuse of technology for the dissemination of illegal content.

Please note that "child pornography", "child porn" and "kiddie porn" are not acceptable terms. The use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child sexual abuse images.

For more information about IWF, please visit http://www.iwf.org.uk/, tel: +44 (0) 1223 237700 or email media @ iwf.org.uk.

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Sitemasher to reduce developers' cutting, pasting

Web site development service Sitemasher went live Monday with a new service geared toward making developers' lives a little easier.

Web site development service Sitemasher went live Monday with a new service geared toward making developers' lives a little easier.

"We wanted to take the complexity out of Web sites," said Sitemasher's CEO, Ron Moravek. "Usually you have to deal with the CMS, the hosting, and the design."

Sitemasher instead offers developers a hosted solution that makes the more annoying parts of Web design less hideous. The browser-based system offers a simplified design structure, along with a completely integrated CMS. Said Moravek: "The CMS maps in real time as you go along, building in the roles and permissions as well."

The drag-and-drop feature updates the schema easily, while the software-as-a-service functionality cuts down on maintenance time, courtesy of fast updates. "We talk to a lot of companies that employ armies of people who just cut and paste all day long, but this allows you to cascade the information to all your networked sites," said Moravek. This keeps the designer and key developers in the equations, but cuts out costly and unnecessary coding staff who man the Dreamweaver or SQL, he said.

Finding a vendor to back their super-specific play was tough, however. "We went around to talk to different data centers, as we knew we'd be growing across multiple data centers. But when we wanted to bring in full virtualization and Citrix boxes, they didn't want to deal with that," said Moravek.

The Vancouver-based company paired up with a neighboring vendor to power its outsourced infrastructure, Peer 1 Network Enterprises.

"It offers start-ups that flexibility," said Peer 1's Robert Miggins, senior vice-president of business development. "We own and manage the network, and adapt the bandwidth to their needs. It benefits them as their business changes, and it scales really well." This is a growing trend in the SMB market, said Miggins, who has seen a spike in the number of smaller and start-up companies outsource their hosting.

According to a recent customer study from the San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting, nearly 70 percent of IT managers expect over the next five years that the number of IT functions they outsource to hosting, software-as-a-service or cloud service providers will increase.

With the current economic turmoil, many feel that the pressure on IT budgets is set to remain constant, or even increase. Outsourcing has often been touted as a cost saving option (mostly, in truth, by the IT service providers themselves), so it comes as no surprise then that the survey identifies a number of IT managers assigning a significant part of their budgets to hosted services.

Indeed, 47 percent said they spend between zero and 20 percent of their IT budget on hosted services, while 30 percent of respondents said that they spend 30 to 50 percent of their IT budget on hosted services.

Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent said that they expect the percentage of IT budgets spent on hosted services to increase over the next five years. And acceptance of outsourcing applications to be hosted elsewhere seems to be rising, with 40 percent not hesitant to host any application externally.

The fledgling hostee Sitemasher has 2,000 Web sites live so far, and has plans to build an east coast data center, along with an e-commerce solution.

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=E3AE5D42-17A4-0F78-31CDE3DBB76A9E59