Content snitch

Do you know what Web content is on your company's computers? It seems a simple enough question, but it turns out that all sorts of content gathered from all sorts of sites accumulates as you and your co-workers perambulate around the 'Net. The problem is some of this content is not appropriate and can represent legal liability.

Let us make a digression here and point you to a story in Wired. The story is about a cop who is about to do time for downloading kiddie porn. While we do not defend his actions, the fact is that many of us who do research on the Internet could find ourselves, unwittingly, in a similar situation. The plethora of pop-ups that some sites generate can download images and other content that could easily cause problems. One lesson the Wired article shows is that if the feds want to get you, they only need one piece of evidence. From the story: "One click, you're guilty," an FBI agent says. "A federal offense is that easy."

Even if the hidden content on your systems isn't a federal offense, there is a lot of content that could lead to sexual harassment issues or simply contravene company policies. And while you could just purge the content from systems, there is often the need to find out what people are viewing.

But how to identify the "iffy" content? "Problematic" pictures can be hard to find when tens of thousands of image files are involved. And then there are URLs, text, audio and video files. In short, a tool is needed, and Gearhead has been experimenting with a pretty good one.

The tool is Snitch Professional from Hyperdyne Software. Snitch runs on PCs and can examine local and mapped drives so you could scan shares on the other machine. It can detect "interesting" content on your system in several ways. It knows what file types need to be examined (text, video and audio, and Snitch also checks the names and text content of files to see if they use any words such as !^%# ).

To identify text, Snitch has a default list of keywords and phrases considered suspicious or obscene. These keywords are used in filename and URL searches. You can create and rate your own keywords and add them to the list.