 rolandeCertifiablePremium,Mod
join:2002-05-24
Columbus, OH
Linksys
AT&T Midwest
| Smartfilter has terrible quality control over categorization Through testing and eval work I was doing comparing several of the filtering engines on-box on a BlueCoat platform, I found Smartfilter's overall quality of categorization, relatively speaking, to be quite dismal to say the least. I ran a list of over 577,000 URLs, captured out of a production environment that Smartfilter allowed through either non-categorization or incorrect categorization, against a competing engine. Over 17,000 URLs were classified as Porn, Malware, or Proxy Avoidance.
A month later I ran the same list against Smartfilter again to see if the updates had caught up. Smartfilter only picked up about 2,000 of those 17,000 URLs.
Smartfilter's Nudity category is known to have terrible accuracy. It caused so many issues requiring overrides in our environment that we removed it from the blocked categories list.
Their product's biggest downfall is that they rely primarily on web crawling to feed the database. Whatever heuristics engine they are using to automate the categorization process is terrible. Not to mention the process to correct these problems is regularly problematic and fraught with issues. In any given day, nearly 60% of all URLs accessed in a production environment with Smartfilter are listed as uncategorized. The majority of these uncategorized URLs (upwards of 80%) turn out to be Porn, Malware, Remote Access, and Proxy Avoidance tools. Really gives you the warm and fuzzies about a product, when you see that kind of crap day in and day out for years.
--
Ignorance is temporary...stupidity lasts forever!
»www.thewaystation.com/
»blog.thewaystation.com/ |
