CYBERSPACE—It is becoming increasingly common to discover that surveys are being sponsored and propagated by companies whose products or services have a direct correlation with the outcome of the survey, and that more times than not, the results support the need for the product.
Anyone surprised by that trend? I didn’t think so.
The latest—by only a day or two—is from Optenet, a company whose products include web filtering services with names like ChildSecure, WebSecure, MailSecure, ContentSecure and End Point Protection. Because Lord knows you can’t be secure enough while traversing the shark-infested waters of the internet.
And then there’s the porn, which, as everyone knows, wants to take your children from you and inculcate them with Matrix-like fantasies while simultaneously sucking their innocence from them like vampires in heat. Want some proof?
Released just today, the data used to compile the study is “accumulated and compiled from a database of hundreds of millions of URLs, in which network computer threats and security threats are analyzed and updated continually in real-time by experts in Web content, who directly link to the security systems of Optenet’s clients.”
The results are predictable, according to a press release issued Wednesday.
“The report, which includes a representative sample of approximately 4 million extracted URLs, shows that adult content on the internet as well as illegal content such as child pornography and illegal drug purchase has undergone a significant increase of 17 percent in the first quarter of 2010, as compared to the same period in 2009,” it read.
It’s funny how they lumped those categories in with one another. Or is it?
“Additionally, Websites related to the online role-playing games (RPGs), such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto 4, have grown by more than 212 percent in the first three months of 2010,” the announcement said. “Websites that contain violence have grown by 10.8 percent, terrorism content by 8.5 percent, and illegal drugs purchase by 6.8 percent are continuing to grow.” Not sure what that last part about the illegal drugs means, but whatever; be scared anyway.
Of course, it wasn’t only the dangerous sites that grew.
“Other forms of content found most commonly on the internet relate to online shopping (+9 percent), travel and tourism (+5.7 percent), computer science and sports (+4.2 percent), and leisure and entertainment (+3.6 percent),” concluded the report. We mean “concluded” literally, since those figures were saved for dead last.
But we do readily concede that the unregulated nature of the internet means that smart people need to not only be cautious when surfing around, but also put reasonable precautions into place.
This is not lost on Optenet’s director of child protection projects, Luisa Rotta, who commented, “When you consider that more than one third of the Internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting Websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”
Luckily, Optenet provides just those products. Just in case you missed the salient numbers from the study, they are:
* Pornography makes up 37 percent of the total content on the internet.
* Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212 percent.
* Websites that contain violence (+10.8 percent), terrorism content (+8.5 percent), and illegal drugs purchase (+6.8 percent) continue to grow.
More information can be found on the Optenet website, if you dare.
