Our History |
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Watchdog, a global specialist in Internet filtering, was originally founded in NZ in 1999. As the provision of web content filtering services was unavailable in New Zealand (NZ), Watchdog built a business providing Internet filtering and connectivity services to residential, business and education customers. The Ministry of Education has awarded Watchdog contracts to provide web and email filtering as well as hardware firewall services to state and integrated schools. They also provide low socio-economic homes with filtered internet connections. Watchdog developed its own tunneling technology enabling cost-effective implementation of general Internet filtering to businesses and schools. Watchdog tunnelling technology integrates well with any ISP connection allowing general filtering technology to be made available as a hosted service external to the ISP’s network. Since 2006, Watchdog International has been offering services internationally, specifically offering two filtering technologies to achieve two types of filtering; ‘general’ filtering of inappropriate material and filtering of ‘illegal material’ i.e. child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI). These filtering technologies can be implemented as ‘in-house’ solutions or accessed as an externally hosted service. As a company independent of filtering vendors, Watchdog chooses the best technology for the application. Peter Mancer, founder of Watchdog, has worked with government organisations, law enforcement, not-for-profit groups (i.e. IWF, ECPAT), technology providers and Internet Service Providers in many countries around the world. He has championed the development of specialist filtering technology to combat CSAI being marketed via the Internet. This technology has now been successfully trialled by the NZ Department of Internal Affairs and has been implemented within the NZ Watchdog ISP service for some time. This filtering technology is now commercialised and known as NetClean Whitebox, enabling blocking of illegal CSAI at ISP and carrier level. It has since been implemented in the UK and across Europe, most recently by the carrier TeliaSonera. NetClean are a Swedish company specialising in solutions for detecting and filtering CSAI. In addition to the Whitebox product they also have a NetClean product that enables Networks to implement CSAI detection systems. Watchdog is the distributor for NetClean in Asia-Pacific and works with them in other countries including Europe and Canada. Watchdog provides education, business and ISP markets with ‘general’ filtering services which offer many categories and a much wider range of material deemed inappropriate in these markets. The combination of filtering technology from 8e6 Technologies with Watchdog Tunnelling Technology enables ISPs to offer general filtering services. Watchdog are distributors for 8e6 in Australasia. More recently Watchdog has also been appointed as Google's preferred partner and reseller for the NZ education sector. Based on Google's impressive and growing array of online applications (such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Video and a suite of filtering solutions), Watchdog now provides solutions and support to NZ schools and is exploring offshore markets as well. For further information contact Watchdog International Ltd. Managing Director:
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