The Hindu Business Line : Drishti develops device to block Net porn

Hyderabad June 10 A device that can block pornographic material on the Internet has been developed by the Hyderabad-based start-up Drishti Systems Ltd.

Claimed by the company to be first such device, which it calls a statistical pornography filter — NetOptima, it is a `plug n play' hardware product to be hooked onto the network for best results.

Mr Anil K. Chandra, Head-R&D, and Mr Abhishek Bhalerao, one of the developers from the company, told newspersons that the product uses an intelligent pattern-matching algorithm to analyse the Web content and filter unwanted pornographic material. An application for US patent for the product is pending, they said.

NetOptima can make up to 25 million searches in 2.3 seconds with the algorithms. Existing products either block pornographic material using key words or domain-name and they are not fully effective. Thus, "Our product has big potential", they claimed.

The market for the product, which at present costs about Rs 65,000, would be educational institutes, ISPs (Internet Service Providers), corporates, Government agencies and so on. Initial discussions with corporates and educational institutes were quite encouraging while there were `glitches' to be ironed out with ISPs they said.

The product offers selective blocking, which means the ISP can provide the service on demand to the interested subscribers only.

While Pakistan topped the list with the highest search on the Internet pornographic scale, India was a close second. Studies have found that 70 per cent of all Internet port traffic occurs during the 9 to 5 workday. It is estimated that 62 per cent of employees surf sexually explicit materials.

Drishti, a five-year-old company earns revenues through its broadband services here and depends on unsecured loans for its research driven efforts, Mr Anil Chandra explained.