Picture the scene: someone in your workplace is surfing the Internet - not to look at appropriate job-related material but other stuff.
Survey after survey has shown that exposure to the stuff in question (okay, porn) causes a 300 per cent decline in company output. In addition, the viewer is likely to experience an array of symptoms ranging from irritability to blindness. Even passive exposure to porn - operating a computer previously used for ogling erotica can result in vile skin infections.
The obvious solution is to force any deviants caught in the act to toil in a pigpen until they repent. But there is an alternative approach that can prevent users straying from salubrious sites in the first place: the proxy server.
This is a product offered by Microsoft with its Internet Security and Acceleration Server, Sun Microsystems with iPlanet Web Proxy Server and myriad minnows such as Team Squid's Squid.
It hovers between the Web browser and the real server, and intercepts Internet requests from clients so they cannot communicate directly with the Internet. Where the censorship comes in is that a proxy server can be configured to block unseemly requests, thus ensuring that users do not clap eyes on naked human flesh.
Paradoxically, a proxy can play a subversive role. Consider the Great Firewall of China - the national firewall designed by Cisco to block Internet content which the state feels would trigger social disorder. This perhaps only increases the allure of the content in question and has helped turn trying to breach the wall into a dangerous sport.
In this case, proxy servers are a means of viewing blocked pages. Friends discreetly pass around proxy server addresses or find them online.