Finding efficiencies
Further efficiency is gained by not sending the entire blacklist to each client site. Instead, only portions relevant to local surfing patterns are transmitted.
Any entry that remains unused for six weeks is dropped from the local list. "There's no Internet management tool that is 100 percent foolproof, but ours is about 98 percent," says Bernard.
"It's completely self-funding," he added, suggesting that each year customers can save 10 times the original cost of Internet Sheriff in reduced bandwidth consumption.
Stephen Goodwin, Tel.Net's technical sales and support manager, says the product has been under development since 1998. Around 200 sites in each of Internet Sheriff's categories were analysed in order to identify common features that can be used to identify each type.
Other approaches are available to address the problem of dynamic classification. "Neural networks imitate the brain's ability to sort out patterns and learn from trial and error, discerning and extracting the relationships that underlie the data with which it is presented . . . neural networks excel at recognising shapes or patterns, learning from experience, or sorting relevant data from irrelevant," (from the Infoplease Encyclopaedia).
SurfControl is one example of software that uses neural networks. "It has become critical to develop intelligent technologies that can interpret and understand information, that's why we've invested significant R&D resources into neural network technologies to deliver products that contain Adaptive Reasoning Technology components.
Today, any Web filtering solution without neural networks is really only half a solution," says Steve Purdham, CEO of SurfControl. He's probably overstating the case, but it is reasonable to say that you can't rely on blacklists and whitelists to enforce or monitor appropriate use policies.
Actually, Bayesian methods and neural networks aren't mutually exclusive, as the former can be used within the latter. Some approaches to monitoring focus on individual PCs rather than the network backbone.
"There are numerous keystroke monitoring technologies but these are rarely used in the enterprise. They are sometimes installed on very sensitive data stores," says Tim Smith, security consultant at Dimension Data Australia.
Keystroke logging is of questionable value in discouraging cyberbludging. It's probably most suited to situations calling for the specific surveillance of an individual or location arising from particular suspicions rather than routine monitoring.
The relatively low cost of software products in this category may make them attractive to micro-businesses that actively suspect some wrongdoing, but a moderately skilled user may be able to work around them. But as we'll see later, surreptitious use may have legal implications.
Software that logs keystrokes often has other features that provide additional information that is more useful to the suspicious employer, such as the amount of time spent using various applications and documents.
If someone outside your HR department is spending a lot of time on www.monster.com.au or frequently opens a Word document called Resume.doc, you probably have a staffing problem.
Similar information is also collected--perhaps more accurately--by Scalable Software's Survey. A Survey agent is installed on each PC, and this records the amount of time spent actively using applications or Web sites.
Note the word "actively": Survey ignores idle time and focuses on interactions such as typing, clicking, and scrolling. Records from across the organisation are aggregated in a database, which is then used to generate a variety of reports.
"Survey provides a clear picture of the entire client--the PC and PC user--so that management can understand trends in software usage, workplace habits and ongoing changes in how people use PCs," says Don Graves, managing director of Survey distributor Express Software.
Various insights can be gained from these reports. An organisation might find that less than half of its employees are using one of the applications it has selected as part of its standard PC environment, that a particular area of its intranet deserves more attention, or that some employees need additional training in the use of a new application.
Traffic shapers are hardware devices that sit between an organisation's network and its connection to the Internet. They examine the contents of data packets and the protocols used in order to classify the traffic, and then prioritise different classes according to administrator-defined policies.
For example, business-critical applications can be guaranteed the bandwidth they require, while a non-essential use such as MP3 downloading can be limited to a trickle.
Products such as the Packeteer PacketShaper can also maximise the useful throughput of a link-or as Bob Jones, Packeteer's territory manager for Australia and New Zealand puts it, the "goodput"--by exploiting features of TCP to smooth bursty traffic into a steady stream.
i think that the cyberbludging special was helpful