Cobion's OrangeBox Web Home version 1.0 is a fully-featured home filtering solution aimed at ISPs and enterprises supported by a data center that crawls 120 million websites every month.

by ISP-Planet Staff [March 27, 2003]

Cobion has released version 1.0 of its OrangeBox Web Home filtering software. The company, founded in Kassel, Germany in 1997, is new to the United States, having founded its Burlington, Mass. subsidiary at the end of 2002. The company's proprietary technology comes from the world of optics, a field in which Germany has always excelled.

Originally, Cobion developed optical computer recognition systems to assist manufacturers. But the company realized that the same technology could be used to improve Internet filtering. John Matera, president of the company's U.S. subsidiary, says, that his software enables computers to do a variety of useful filtering tasks.

"We can look at images and distinguish pornography," he says. "We can analyze language—using more than just keywords—looking at symbols, incorporating the image of a credit card into our analysis, for example. Put it all together and you get the ability to categorize websites and e-mail."

He claims that Cobion is undertaking to categorize the entire Internet, and currently has about 1,000 servers dedicated to that task. With the aid of a language database of 15 million entries in 58 categories and 11 languages, derived from 2.1 billion pre-analyzed images, the company's German data center analyzes 120 million more websites every month and publishes 100,000 updates every day.

ISPs can provide the product directly to consumers through a revenue share model, or they can install the product on their servers. Matera says that larger ISPs prefer to manage the database themselves, and download the updates once each day, perhaps after midnight.

The client software accesses the database (or a local mirror of it) remotely, which allows the software to take advantage of updates as they happen throughout the day. Parental control is focused on a single password that allows the home administrator (i.e., parent) to choose which types of sites to filter, to create whitelists and blacklists, to block access at certain hours, and to view logs of all blocked URLs. Members of the family who do not have the password will not even be able to shut down the OrangeBox process in the Windows Task Manager.

Enterprise customers have different controls, such as the creation of different levels of filtering for different user groups.

For massive ISPs with an in-house development team, the company supplies an SDK. It also assists ISPs who want to incorporate an already-deployed anti-virus engine into the OrangeBox solution.

"Whether an ISP is focused on business customers, small business customers, or residential customers, we enable them to offer a revenue generating service profitably," said Matera. "Reaching out to ISPs is a good way for us to address the residential and SOHO market. ISPs can sell our product to this market because they have the customers."

Matera claims that the home product is easy to install (although the security features of the product are so powerful that home users must make sure they know their password or they'll have to reinstall the operating system). He says the product is small, less than 1 MB, making it easy to download, and, when running on the customer's PC, the product is not resource intensive.

The enterprise product, he says, can take 19 minutes to install, and even customization with the SDK could take as little as 2 weeks.

Pricing and availability
Pricing was not available at press time, but Matera said the solution was deployed at ISPs ranging in size from 30,000 users to 3 million. The company is also talking to at least one ISP that wants to deploy the software on residential gateways.

With filtering in 11 languages, he says the solution is particularly useful to ISPs with an international footprint, which is why the company has opened additional offices in London and Shanghai.

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