Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Norton can't block Bing porn

As follow up to my post from Tuesday about the ability for someone to view porn from within Bing, I just heard from a Symantec spokesperson that the company's Internet monitoring and filtering service, OnlineFamily.Norton, can't yet prevent Bling users from searching sexually explicit terms for websites or videos. The company plans to add Bing to its protected search engines in the next release. Other major search engines, including Google, are covered by the software's SafeSearch feature.

In the mean time, Symantec recommends that parents use OnlineFamily.Norton to block access to all of Bing -- which isn't particularly good for Microsoft.

OnlineFamily is a free Windows and Mac application that can be used to block sites and monitor a child's online behavior. Unlike some Internet monitoring programs, it doesn't operate in stealth mode so, if parents use that feature, kids know that they're web activities are being watched.

Because Bing plays videos within its own site and doesn't require the user to click through, checking the browser history or using monitoring programs like OnlineFamily, would only show that they visited Bing.com, not what videos they watched from within the site.

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