shakh your bootie

I do, actually, a friend of mine used to work for a company over here that provides this software....

Variety of means, but the sites are scanned for certain keywords, & the images are scanned using pattern recognition systems. Quite smart, really....

Sam FTQ

Then why don't they utilise this technology in the rest of the world to prevent people looking at really awful stuff, like child pornography?

Autonomy

The TRA (Etisalat and Du's "parent company") employ the services of an American company called Secure Computing. They decide on the site's purpose and allocate a term (like a movie genre) to describe the site.

Have a look here for some more on the proxy http://proxywatch.blogspot.com/

shiva

because then nobody could look at porn of any kind and the internet would collapse immediately.

(an estimated 80% of online content is porn of some form)

Eeyore

Personally, I've never believed the "pattern recognition" stuff, given that it was (and is) perfectly possible to access naughty pictures via Etisalat as long as the URL isn't on the blocklist.

At its heart, the blocking is actually very crude. An American company does the automated scanning of websites for keywords, if enough keywords are detected the URL of that site is added to the blocklist, which is updated daily. All that happens at the Etisalat end is that whenever you try to access a website, the proxy checks to see whether or not the site you're after is on the list or not.

Ray

Or more .... I could look at all of it ...

But the wife is right behind me ....

Slingshot

this is really silly now