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Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools
Tom Davies writes: "Every student and teacher in the state of New South Wales will have an email address and web access by March. And porn filtering to go with it, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald."
Thanks to the good US of A all schools that want to get their e-rate must now filter their web access. I got to a school that has had open access for years on a special agreement with the district which filters via a Cisco Pix firewall and websense (grr). Anyways even though we dont spend out days looking at porn (for the most part) we're filtered now. I figured out a nice way to get us around this. The law states that the schools must block sites, but doesn't say they have to do a good job. I have a Redhat 7.2 box setup running Squid and I'm working to get Squidguard up to block a list of about 100,000 sites. Only porn and not using expressions. This is a pathetic amount of sites and does no real good, but since our students dont look at it and we are blocking it will allow us to get our e-rate. Loop-holes are your friend
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
"...prevent sexually explicit material, pornography or material regarded as inappropriate for different age groups getting through"
Interesting that they mention sexual material twice, then lump all other objectionable material into a bin called "innappropriate" at the end. Why is sex our top priority when censoring for minors? Why not violence, hate propaganda, religious cults, and gun catalogues?
I think it's pretty representative of how out-of-wack regulator's attitudes are towards sex in general. I can think of many more things I'd rather prevent my kids from seeing than a little nudity.
Maybe I should've explained the policy better.
Information on condoms, or anything related to sex-education is OK, even doing research for a class on porn is fine (note from instructor is required). What isn't OK is defined here:
Personal use of any University information system to access, download, print, store, forward, transmit or distribute obscene material.
Note the words Personal and the word obscene (as defined by the Supreme Court), too lazy to look up the link.
There are absolutely no filtering programs in effect on any of the computers on campus. This is left entirely in the judgement of the consultants maning the labs, i.e. me. Basically I see some beasty porn, some C**shots, etc and I kick them out of the library. Sounds harsh from a ACLU member doesn't it? Well you catch people masturbating to porn (never women I might add *Sigh) when you are working and then see just how happy you are to see it.
Policy isn't bad and is really quite reasonable. Just don't look at porn to get off and you don't violate the policy.
I managed my father's IT for a while, as a hobby. I have always believed in irrestricted access to the net.
What did i found out? That while some used it very wiselly, other just surfed for pr0n, news, chat, ICQ, etc. whenever they where alone or unwatched.
Of course, some guys had a balance between pr0n and work and some others did not.
I tried everything and reached the conclusion not everyone is resposible and depending on the case, i could just talk to them, or ban them from www and/or email.
Some people are addicts, they can't restrict themselves a bit and they KNOW they are wasting time. They just can't help it, and i find it better to ban them from certain things than to have their boss fire them.
Another solution would have been to let thing escalate (not because i'd tell anyone), but because it becomes evident.
I better like the monitor and punish strategy than the to limit EVERYONE because of a few.
Hard experience...what would you do?
unfinished: (adj.)
It is a statewide thing.
About 2 or 3 years ago, the Victorian government subsidised the hookup of a 64k ISDN line to every school where it was possible - which basically amounts to nearly all of them as most of the schools are in the greater Melbourne area.
Along with this came a free e-mail address for every teacher in the state.
Three different levels of filtering have been available - none, restrictive (no porn/warez/hotmail) and very restrictive (selected educational sites only).
The sad thing is that the links were provided by Telstra, who have now decided to more than triple the price.. for schools that have enough trouble paying their teachers and buying resources already.
"Don't break my arse, my bargey wargey arse, I don't think my pants would understand..."