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It could end up as a technology bar brawl.

Untangle, a company that makes a security gateway based on open source, next Wednesday plans what it's calling the "Deep Throat Fight Club" in a San Francisco bar to beat on Web filters of six competing vendors.

At the Thirsty Bear in downtown San Francisco at about noon next Wednesday, Untangle says it will pummel six Web filters with test scripts to show how well the filters can block porn sites. Untangle says the six Web filters selected to undergo this rough treatment are from WatchGuard, SonicWall, Fortinet, Barracuda, WebSense and ScanSafe.

It won't be pretty, says Raul Mujica, Untangle's vice president of marketing. In fact, anyone attending will need to sign a waiver explaining they could be seeing some pretty awful porn.

"Nobody knows how these filters perform in catching porn sites," Mujica says. "They may only catch 80% or 90%. We want to get a sense, what is the industry benchmark?" Untangle says it will make the test scripts available so anyone can use them to test Web filters. (Compare Web security gateways.) 

The "Deep Throat Fight Club" is planned to coincide with the RSA Conference taking place next week in San Francisco.