Eyeguard from Eye-t Technology is one of the odder
censorware programs to come out onto the market. Unlike programs like
Cybersitter, Eyeguard does not filter on text content or known nodes of net
naughtiness (i.e., Playboy, the
National Organization of Women, the
Turkish Wrestling League), it prevents pictures of
nekkid people being displayed in your web browser, email, or image viewer.
How does it know it's a picture of a nekkid person and not, say, a picture of a defeated and embarrassed Italian
soccer player crying in the arms of his
nona? Well, Eyeguard has crunched thousands of
pornographic images and come up with an
algorithm that determines how much flesh (i.e.,
skin tone) is being displayed in the picture. If too much skin tone is present, it either freezes the computer or logs the incident, depending on settings at
install time.
Now before you say "well, that's okay I don't like looking at naked blonde Norwegian women I like raw 'n nasty
pygmy porn", know that Eyeguard contains skin tone gradients for all the err races.
Eyeguard is not
perfect. It doesn't work well on black-and-white photos. Eyeguard makers aren't too worried as they feel your
hardcore porn jockeys don't much go in for black and white photos. However, fans of
Celine Dion and Japanese
sumo wrestling should be concerned as one published test demonstrated Eyeguard refused to load those control images.