ScrubIT, which launched yesterday, wants to protect your home from porn sites. Implementation is pretty simple from the end user standpoint. Just point you machine to the ScrubIT DNS, specify which sites you want to block, and ScrubIT will make sure anyone from your network is not able to reach those sites. Even otherwise ScrubIT will maintain a list of potentially harmful and/or pornographic websites so that you don’t have to create the list from scratch. ScrubIT has more plans around its service like users being able to customize their DNS filter for a small fee. That is still to come.
One issue I see is that would you really trust a third party service to peek into your Internet traffic data. Do even know what all data they are collecting as part of this service. Also who is looking at the data? I think If someone wants, he/she can easily setup such a service and start looking into an unsuspecting users login/password information for most of the common web services which goes through in plain(except for Gmail and Yahoo mail which automatically use SSL). Consequences of someone leaking out this data can be very fatal for most of us. Another issue that can arise is that ScrubIT category filters getting overly aggressive and start blocking sites that you might actually find useful, just like some of the dumb enterprise filters work.
Anyhow, till now the company hasn’t disclosed who is behind the service. After they initially contacted me yesterday, all I could get from them was that ScrubIT has a “pretty diverse management group with experts in computer science, networking, statistics, and business development”. That doesn’t help much. “Anthony” at ScrubIT did add that they will have a blog up “later this week”. Well its is Friday today. Would watchout for who is behind the service. For now I would recommend people to hold back on this change.
OpenDNS has also been working in the similar domain but for phishing sites.
Links:
ScrubIT
