One of the small perks of my job is regularly being asked to eat lunch (and occasionally dinner) in nice restaurants; although the chore of scribbling down notes rapidly between mouthfuls doesn’t do wonders for the digestion. And it makes certain foodstuffs definite no-no’s; think long pasta, anything which needs to be manhandled such as a crab or a bowl of mussels, and anything involving chopsticks. Not that this rule can’t be bent from time to time by the lure of some Michelin-starred dim sum, though.

The other day I enjoyed lunch in Mayfair with unified threat management specialist SonicWall. Although we spent a fair amount of our time star-gazing (Anna Friel and her bloke, since you ask) and discussing a certain episode of Brookside, there was also an opportunity to talk shop for a bit. The firm’s European MD Keith Bird told me interestingly that he didn’t believe in forcing ISPs to control the amount of spam that hits our inboxes, although many experts have done so. Instead he said service providers could easily do something similar to SonicWall, which invites feedback from customers on inappropriate or potentially dangerous web sites. This information then helps them to build up a fairly extensive list of bad URLs which is used in the firm’s Content Security Manager solutions. ISPs, Bird said, could easily provide a similar service to their customers.

I reckon it’s only a matter of time before online service providers start to do more of this kind of thing; they are already rolling out packages with built-in security (Talk Talk and Barclays, to name but two). Adding in extras which make their service more attractive to customers is a bit of a no-brainer, and with competition for users getting fiercer, security is an obvious area where there is room for clear blue water between ISPs to appear. Definitely food for thought there.