Intego, a provider of Macintosh Internet security software, having just released VirusBarrier 1.0 for the Palm OS, has now announced the Intego Content Rating Division for rating Internet content.
The division was created to protect children using the Internet and to help companies increase their employees’ productivity, according to Jean-Paul Florencio, vice president of sales and marketing. The Intego Content Rating Division will have two main roles: analyzing and rate Web site content, and developing a content ratings database.
Intego says that Web site content will be rated in several ways, and the results of these ratings will be entered into the Intego Content Database. In addition to a standard list of URLs rated by category and level of content, Intego has developed a new technology, Content Environment Behavior Analysis, that the company says performs “complex semantic analysis” on Web sites to determine exactly what sort of content they contain. This provides intelligent content ratings — so sites such as those on AIDS prevention and breast cancer are not considered dangerous, according to Florencio.
Ratings will be made to determine content considered forbidden for children (such as sex sites), and content undesirable in a business environment, such as gambling or job search sites. The Intego Content Database will be available as a software development kit (SDK) available to hardware and software manufacturers. Purportedly, it can be integrated into all types of hardware (routers, firewalls, etc.) and software (browsers, Internet appliance operating systems, server software, etc.). And the database will be work on a variety of computing platforms, including the Mac.
“Content control and filtering is one of the key issues concerning the Internet today,” Florencio said in a company statement. “This database will provide reliable content ratings to software and hardware manufacturers that can be integrated into their products, providing added value for their customers.”
For more information, go to the Intego Web site (http://www.intego.com). The company also makes a product called ContentBarrier, a parental control solution that “sets up a protective wall around your computer” with predefined categories that let parents choose what they don’t want their children to see, and also create custom categories. ContentBarrier is OS 9 compatible and an OS X version is in the works.
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