Content Filter Company Scraping Around?

Last year, Secure Computing Corporation claimed that .ie ccTLD had tens of thousands of pages of iffy content. It claimed to have done a “global study” of the number of porn pages on the web and it found that the ccTLDs were riddled with the stuff. They had millions of pages of it. Of course .com/net/org/biz/info websites were not included in this “study”. This “global study” amounted to nothing more than entering a few obviously dodgy keywords into Google and limiting the results by using site:.cctld.

It was a very crude attempt by SCC to market its content filtering software. ENN ran it without question but later corrected the article after getting the headline “Study reveals 60,000 Irish porn sites” seriously wrong. (It was 68000 webpages rather than websites.) Silicon Republic did a good analysis.

So what has this got to do with the present day? Well it seems that an IP from SCC has been sniffing around on some Irish sites with an incompetently forged browser User Agent: Microsoft_Internet_Explorer_5.00.438 . Perhaps a new press release on another dubious “study” should be expected. I wonder if this time, editors will be so eager to run SCC’s claims without verification.

Tags: - - -

Written by John McCormac on July 28th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Search Engines.

Related articles

Comments disabled

Comments on this article have been disabled.