START-UP NATION: Metacert:Entrepreneur Paul Walsh has developed a system that allows pornography to be blocked without cutting access to other non-sexual content

THE INTERNET can be a dangerous place for children with pornography easily available. So entrepreneur Paul Walsh has developed a system that allows you to block all illicit material without cutting access to other non-sexual content.

“Family safety is a huge area,” says Walsh. “The problem we wanted to solve is that every other system out there will block pornography, but it will also block other websites that have nothing to do with pornography.”

For instance, if you type hardcore into Google with your family filter switched on, you will get zero results. But hardcore can relate to dance music, sports and myriad other areas that have nothing to do with sex.

To block all those pages is overly strident censorship, a problem Walsh and his team at Metacert have solved by using a more sophisticated approach than the one employed by the likes of Google.

“The method by which we find websites is different to how everybody else does it,” says Walsh.

“It’s a classification system that has been built and tweaked over the past few years and our crawler and classifier is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week finding and identifying new pages. The database is increasing every day.”

So far, more than half a billion pages have been identified as unsuitable and are blocked using the Metacert technology.

The system does not rely on key words or phrases but on a set of parameters that changes as quickly as new pornographic content comes online.

The result is that the chances of anything unwanted getting through is reduced to almost zero but your browsing experience is not unnecessarily curtailed by over-zealous computer parenting.

Another problem he has resolved is that although existing family filters can be heavy-handed, they also fail to keep up with the wealth of phrases and acronyms used to describe pornography.

Walsh demonstrates this by typing “CFNM” into a search engine. Even with the filter switched on, he got thousands of sites showing “clothed female, naked male” videos and pictures.

“We are more aware of these things because we have made it our business to know and to understand all of this,” he explains.

Of course, no system is perfect so there are safeguards built in. If someone believes a site has been unfairly blocked, they can send a message to Walsh’s team and it will be assessed manually. Where somebody comes across a site that should have been blocked but hasn’t, they can send that for assessment too.

It can take weeks for current systems to deal with these sort of cases but Walsh believes his team will deal with all queried pages within hours.

Child access to sexually explicit material online is a serious problem, with studies showing that children as young as 11 are addicted to porn. But for Walsh, it goes beyond child protection.

For adults suffering porn addiction, such a system can remove the temptation. Businesses will be able to avoid lawsuits by preventing workers downloading and disseminating sexually explicit material at work. Public wifi systems at cafes will be able to ensure their customers are not downloading porn while others try to enjoy their beverage.

The donkey work has been done and beta-testing of the system is now underway. Walsh and his co-founder and wife Sheetal Mehta Walsh, have secured $740,000 in funding and set up an office in San Francisco.

He originally tried to work with the Halo Business Angel Partnership in Ireland but failed to gain any interest following a misunderstanding regarding the purpose of his mission.

So he moved to the US where he has attracted funding from 12 investment angels including senior management at Skype, Oracle and Qik. Vijay Tella and Bhaskar Roy of Skype are on his board and he is preparing to announce contracts with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.

His previous career has shown him exactly how a small enterprise can develop into a world famous brand. Walsh worked for AOL in the 1990s. Its first Dublin office was a portable cabin in Tallaght, but it was soon to become one of the world’s best known brands.

After that he worked as an adviser in the telecoms industry to companies such as Orange, Eircell and O2. In 2003 he founded Segala and created the W3C global standard for labelling internet content.

He started looking at internet filtering out of a belief that people should have the right to block content they don’t want, but still enjoy everything else the internet has to offer.

Home users can visit meta cert.comnow and download the software for free.