From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 95 15:56:49 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: SurfWatch for employees (ugh)
Message-ID: <199507182255.PAA06275@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:36 PM 7/17/95 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>Consistent with the trend towards treating employees like children,

I'm not surprised someone sees a market for this.  I've worked at
a number of customer sites that block access to 900 numbers and
local pay-per-call numbers, which also blocks access to Time-of-day
and some vendors' customer-support numbers.

>Webster Network Strategies has announced (but apparently has not
>shipped) a product similar to SurfWatch but aimed at an employment
>environment. The product is called "WebTrack" and supposedly supports
>access lists of URLs, where access can be allowed to "all but these sites"
>or "only to these sites". The product also can be configured to log all 
>Web usage by users subjected to its reign of terror. :) WebTrack 
>is priced at $7,500 with an annual subscription to 

I assume for that price that it's a gateway product, rather than a site
license for a censored client (which would require sysadmins to go hunt
down everybody's copy of netscape...)  If so, I hope the system at least offers
caching (to save on outside bandwidth requirements and download time),
and has a fair amount of security so it doesn't become a hole in the firewall.

>its list of interesting (err, forbidden) sites priced at $1,500. 
Wow!  Folks have finally found a way to get paid for looking for porn on the
net! :-)
Surfwatch doesn't make it's censored list easily available (otherwise it'd
probably get pirated, or used as an "interesting sites" index...), but
apparently
it blocks access to things other than just pornography - does Webster
indicate what categories of stuff they're blocking?

#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com