The Naked Truth About Porn Surfers

Computerworld - The founders of the Internet, with their lofty ideals, must be a bit embarrassed to know that one of the Internet's most common uses is for accessing pornographic Web sites.
Porn surfing on the job wastes staff time, fills bandwidth and leads to a hostile work environment. Some of it is likely to be illegal, and it can get your company covered in the press in damaging ways.
The legal hassles from associated sexual-harassment lawsuits can also be very expensive. So, how do we reduce the risks introduced by Internet porn?
Porn Surfer Psychology
When asked to help control a problem, we normally start by imagining why users would want to do something and then try to alter the environment so that they don't even try. For example, some people are driven to commit fraud by problems with drinking, drugs or gambling. We can reduce fraud by offering access to confidential help lines and other services.
When it comes to porn, this understanding is hard to achieve. Why would anyone want to view it at the office? We pay our staff well enough that they can afford Internet access at home or even a monthly subscription to a variety of adult publications, so why would they risk their jobs by abusing systems at work?
Without an effective psychological fix, we are left with technological approaches. Many tools claim to block or filter downloads, but they don't really fix the problem.
The number and names of porn sites are constantly changing, so blocking-software can't stop all porn surfing. Once users realize that we block some sites, will they assume that unblocked sites are approved? If we block a domain name, then how do we stop staffers from accessing the direct IP address? Since the latest Web protocols allow multiple sites to share a single IP address and use Domain Name System names in Web site addresses to direct traffic, how do we avoid blocking legitimate content on shared sites? If we block Web content, then do we approve of porn embedded in e-mails, handed around on CD-ROMs or exchanged via file-sharing networks?
Blocking can also inconvenience legitimate Web users. For example, back when AltaVista Co.'s Web site was popular, our CIO stormed over to the security team, calling us idiots for blocking www.altavista.com. After much shouting, it became clear that he had mistyped the address as "alatavista.com," which, when unblocked, displayed "alata" porn.
However blocking is handled, it will annoy users, who will try to bypass the controls and complain about