One of the least favorite parts of my job is doing the occasional laptop audit at our office. This means I have to look for illegal music and software as well as pornographic material. It’s usually pretty clear when someone has been downloading and collecting such material. We aren’t after the one of two questionable files that could show up through an unintentional pop-up banner. Yet, it never feels good going through someone’s computer even if it belongs to the company. One of the main problems with doing an audit is making sure the procedure is uniform and fair for everyone. It’s one thing to search for illegal mp3 files, but another thing to look through someone’s browser cache.
Recently I read a positive review about a product called Guardware File Audit that appears to be a good solution for the way we check machines. In short, it’s a USB stick with software that checks for pornographic images, video and illegal music. Each stick costs $195 and can be used on an unlimited number of machines. So I bought two of them.
The two USB sticks arrived today and I decided to test it on my home system. I plugged one into a USB port and the drivers installed without a problem. Here is the first screen you see.
I unchecked “Music Files” because I don’t want it telling me the MP3s I trade with my brother and dad are illegal. I left everything else as is and started the scan. Everything seemed to go fine for the first minute and then it hung and popped up good ole’ Doctor Watson. I had to kill the good Doctor which killed the scanning. I tried several more times before realizing it was a single file in my Adobe folder that was causing the problem. Guardware even went so far to show a reminder screen asking that I email the suspected file which is a tiny Adobe icon graphic in .png format to them. I moved the file to my D: drive and started the scan again. About 5 minutes later it finished and presented me with a report of its findings as seen in the screen below.
I like how it presents the images it suspects are pornographic. All but a few of pictures it suspected were stock photos found in my Adobe directory. The first two pictures of the girl in the hat are of my 6 year old daughter. I’m not sure what they contain that triggers Guardware. As I suspected, my machine is PORN FREE!
Overall, the scan was quick and I think it will work well for our needs at work.
Just for fun, I decided to download a picture of Paris, Britney and Clay Aiken. I selected these three for the following reasons:
Paris is showing her newfound cleavage but otherwise she’d look at home in a Land’s End catalog. Britney needs to pull up her pants and put on a shirt. But she’s still covered. And I chose Clay for his seductive pose. Guardware says they check for this stuff so maybe Clay’s pose is just too over the top to pass the audit.
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I started the scan like I did before and about four minutes later I was presented with the following results which gave me a good laugh. 
(Click image to enlarge)
So it’s now clear that Guardware heavily weighs a person’s posture in determining what items to flag. It’s so certain that Clay is porn that he’s flagged 22 times! Paris only gets flagged 6 times and Britney minus her shirt but plenty of plumbers crack doesn’t show up once in the results. Could it be she’s not flagged because the picture is black and white?
I’m not sure what to make of these results, but I’ll bet Britney would be really bummed about them.
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