UK Online Ltd, the subscription-free internet service provider subsidiary of Easynet Group Plc, has installed censorware from Secure Computing Corp onto its service in an effort to portray itself as a family ISP. The Smart Filter software resides on UKOL’s proxy servers, and kicks into action if certain filtering flags are set. No software is installed on the user’s PC, and account holders can use a password to disable the system if they want to buy something online or view pornography. MD Geoffrey Fenton says the list of banned URLs is updated weekly by Secure Computing and runs into hundreds of thousands of addresses. He admits, of course, that this by no means covers all the web’s adults-only content, but in the increasingly crowded UK ISP market, firms need as much to differentiate themselves from the competition as possible.
