OREM, Utah – A software development company based in Utah has created a tool it claims can find “hidden” pornographic videos on home computers without causing parents and spouses to suffer any psychological harm from viewing smutty images.SurfRecon Inc.’s newest offering is an add-on for the company’s flagship product, SurfRecon Home Edition pornography detection and deletion software. The new feature allows parents and spouses quickly to scan a hard drive for digital videos and categorize any files found. The feature also allows the snoops to view Flash (.FLV) video files with the same “Blur safety tool” that is the product’s hallmark for reviewing still images.
According to SurfRecon President Matthew Yarro, “Including a similar Blur tool for video review was important to us, because if pornographic [still] images can be harmful and addictive, you can only imagine what a pornographic video could do to your mental health.”
SurfRecon uses patent-pending digital-signature matching technology to identify and categorize digital video as “safe,” “sexual” or “XXX-rated.” The digital-signature technology leverages the SurfRecon data store, which the company calls “the world’s most extensive database of known pornographic image and video signatures,” in order to identify and categorize files. The database grows continuously as it receives submissions from users and members of the law enforcement community worldwide, according to a SurfRecon statement.
Parents and spouses can use the video review feature to dissect any video by scene change or by individual frames to find pornographic content that may be hidden or obscured within an apparently clean file, the company claims.
“Pornographic websites are flocking to digital video, and .FLV files in particular,” Yarro said. “If a computer had nothing but pornographic video on it — and no sexually explicit images — someone checking the computer might think it was clean, when in fact it was not.
“Unfortunately, there is no automated process that can guarantee that a child or spouse is not accessing pornography,” he added. “Nothing can replace good old-fashioned supervision, but at least SurfRecon can speed up that process and allow parents to stay one-step ahead of a super tech-savvy child.”
The SurfRecon Home Edition software carries a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $39.95 for the DVD version $49.95 for the USB thumb drive version. The product can be purchased directly from SurfRecon (SurfRecon.com), as well as Amazon, Intel, CompUSA, CircuitCity, TigerDirect and other retailers and e-tailers.
SurfRecon also develops pornography detection and management tools for the enterprise, including Web applications that detect, review and delete images and videos on the fly, as they are submitted to user-submitted-content websites or accessed by employees.
