OREM, Utah—There must be something in the water in Orem that encourages the development of USB sticks that detect pornography on a computer hard drive, because now there are two companies from the same place doing the same thing.
The first Orem-based company to produce a porn-searching USB stick was SurfRecon, which released its porn detector last year. Now, Paraben has released the Porn Detection Stick, which the company describes as “a thumb drive device that will search through all the images on your computer, scan them for pornographic content, and create a report of suspected pornographic images. It even scans deleted images so there's no hiding Internet activity.”
Paraben was founded in 1999 as a shareware marketing company, but by 2002 had morphed into a producer of specialized computer forensic software with its release of PDA Seizure.
According to Gizmodo, the Paraben porn stick “is a $100 thumb drive stuffed with Windows-compatible image detection software. Give it an hour and a half, and the device can scan 70,000 images—even deleted ones—with algorithms that analyze ‘facial features, flesh tone colors, image back grounds, body part shapes, and more.’”
Priced at $99, the Paraben stick does not spider video files or the web, but the company says it does have a false positive rate of less than 1 percent.
More information can be found on the Paraben site, which also contains a chart comparing the Porn Detection Stick and the SurfRecon Equalizer. Guess which one sports more features?
