Novell survey reveals football is more popular than sex

A survey by Novell has shown that although many people surf the net for sex, many more look for football.

Novell interviewed 1,000 people who use the Internet at work, and found that over half used the Web to access World Cup sites.

Eugene Forrester, regional product manager at Novell, explained that since businesses gave Internet access to their employees, they have "opened the floodgates to many other areas - with the World Cup being just one of them".

He warned: "Companies need to examine what access they give their employees. Not only will it hit companies in the pocket but it will also take up too much bandwidth on servers."

Some companies tackled World Cup problems by only allowing access to sites that give you scores as they happen and not sites that had video-clips from the tournament. "The aim is to make electronic information useful to a company, not to hinder it," Forrester said.

At the end of 1997, figures showed that 15 per cent of workers used the Web for viewing pornographic or obscene material.