NEWS

Anti-porn shield for Web users

New software which can ostensibly shield Internet surfers from websites containing pornography and has been designed in this country was presented at an international conference in Thessaloniki yesterday in the wake of a police crackdown on child pornography on the Web that has led to dozens of arrests in Greece this year. The software, called Filter X, scans the text and photographs of any website being sought by the surfer and determines whether there is any pornographic content within a fraction of a second, according to information technology experts at Komotini’s Democritus University of Thrace who developed the program. Existing filters operate by banning a list of known pornographic sites but are not capable of spotting, and barring, new sites, they said. The Greek patent, which reportedly costs about the same as anti-virus programs for computers and is similarly easy to download, has been used in schools in Greece and other European Union countries over the past two years as part of a pilot program. It will be available on the market soon.

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