WebSense Patents Censorware System

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 9, 2003 @11:00AM from the ones-and-zeros dept.

Matthew Skala writes "As reported in SiliconValley.internet.com, filtering-software vendor Websense has received US Patent 6,606,659 on a "System and method for controlling access to internet sites". The new features in the patented system seem to revolve around using time limits instead of filtering sites out entirely; offering users a choice of viewing a site and having it logged, or not viewing it; and a scheme for automatically categorizing sites that looks very much like the "Bayesian filters" we've heard so much about in recent weeks. You may be interested in the filtering company's press release about their patent, or my own view."

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Prior art: Novell Netware - in 1994. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-09 11:17 · Score: 5, Informative

I helped to sysadmin a Novell Netware installation back when I was at high school in '94.

I seem to remember that they had a time limiting system. Per user, you could set when that user was allowed to log on and access the network.

We used it make sure that users couldn't access the network when they weren't supposed to be able to - so kids didn't share their accounts with others or access the network outside of the allowed times (after hours unsupervised, etc).

I'm not sure how this would relate to the patent (I'm not a patent lawyer), but this was a form of network censorship based on time.