Slashdot Mirror
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."
And porn filtering to go with it That means approximately 74.6 % of those in the NSW school district have to get a second email address and ISP anyway...
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
Since when was it a right to receive what ever you want on a freely provided information channel. For example when you walk in to your public library you don't expect to go to the magazine section and pick up a copy of the lastest Swank. Prehaps i'm oversimplifing the matter, but I'm of the opinion that if you don't like it and its free go elsewhere.
T
- Use the iPrism filter that is updated regularly
- Block the keywords 'xxx' and 'mp3' from a port-80 web site. (I found out that if I move my web server to port 60, none of these restrictions apply ^_^)
- Use a Novell remote management type system to keep us from signing on to IM programs (OK offtopic...i know...)
But lately people have been finding ways around them, like anonymizers, but iPrism has started to block those too.People at schools: how do the admin folks there 'manage' our visited sites? just sparking a discussion topic...
Kinda makes ya wonder when the people responsible for enabling filters in the first place will realize that the more time you spend blocking a type of site to be accessed the more interest is then generated in those types of sites. I also just got back from being in Australia for the past month and(aside from New Zealand being a more entertaining country) no local australians i met or article i read make a big issue over filtering there.. just the people i met and what i read thoe....
www.evolutionarydeadend.com
for one the service is given for "free" and in a sense its right for them to put filters, but in the other hand that just opens the doors for future violations to online freedom.
- Everybody in Denial -
Note: the article seems only to discuss NSW,
so the implications are not yet Australia-wide.
High school education in Australia tends to be
managed by state governments.
Ian
As systems administrator of Bendigo Senior Secondary College, (Victoria, Australia) [Just below NSW, only better (jk)], I'd like to say all students have unfiltered net access, and have had such for >6 years now; and we have no intentions to start censoring what our students are able to see.
[For the record, systems are in place to track usage, and people are punished for looking up porn n stuff... but there's no censorship or filtering.]
... It's also very nice to see NSW giving students free email addresses... we've only done that for 2 years.
I wonder how much the NSW gov't is charging schools for this honor? Especially since Telstra (the beast of telco in au) has [basically] applied they're patented '3gb cap' to schools too.
Hey .. could they filter my internet connection too so I don't get anymore porn popup ads?
wil
"Realize your dreams NOW, life can be short"
Sex & Violence, in general, are a no-go, not just for games, as far as the OFLC is concerned.
It's the schools server, it's their email address, if they want to filter go right ahead.
Just like complaining about censorship in China, look at the property ownership. Since all "utilities" in China are owned by the government, they get to filter all they want.
The abuse is if you are not allowed to choose an alternative. If the school attempted to censor what the kids do/see when not on the schools dime, for instance.
...or the fact that private ISP service is "illegal" in China.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Yes and no. It was originally released with exactly the same content as everywhere else (Oct/Nov 2001 I think). I have one of those original copies. However, it was later banned, as has been reported. Of course, just because it was banned didn't make it impossible to obtain. Stores were left to sell whatever stock they had of the game, but were unable to obtain any more copies. It has only just been re-released and AFAIK it has had some of the offensive elements removed. ... Damm!
There's an interesting thing about filtering software in schools- I know some schools here in the SF Bay Area use some sort of proxy filtering that makes viewing "innapropriate" material impossible. So if you get spammed by somebody for herbal viagra to increase your sex drive or hot young sluts or what have you, you're not going to be able to check your email with a web-based account because it will be deemed "inappropriate".
Looks like they're on the right track though, with blacklists rather than keyword detection. The $33 million quoted is interesting, I wonder if they included maintenance costs in that projection?
The future isn't what it used to be.
Exactly, could you imagine the outcry from parents when their little kid starts looking up pr0n online? Is it unfair for a school, which specifically is giving the internet for educational purposes, to stop it being used for pornography?
Really, some people do take anti-censorship WAAAY too far.
Of course, that's against the law, so I'm not recommending you do that, just saying that it's affordable and NZ games work on AU psx2s.
Note that Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) is not the same as, or even associated with, the US's very own well-known Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
And, sigh, my sig is so poignant these days :-(
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Internet is filled with addictive stuff...
...which can easily take your attention away from studying.
http://www.virtualcrack.com
Considering I have an assignment due in a few hours on which I haven't yet begun, and I haven't slept in days, maybe I should quit posting on Slashdot....
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.
That sounds like an evil scheme to hide the truth from the Austrailian schoolchildren that, yes, the New Zealanders are really having sex with the sheep...
I would think that requiring schools to censor content in order to receive funding pretty clearly infringes upon the first amendment rights of the site operators.
I have seen it argued that if the service is provided "free," you have no right to complain. However, the service is not free. Citizens and corporations pay taxes to the government and expect services in return. If the government provides one of those services at no charge, that doesn't make it free.
The real question, I think, is why these schemes aren't being challenged. I suspect the answer lies in one or more of the following:
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
AIM (and a decent amount of other IM programs) will allow you to connect to their servers on ports that are allowed by most firewall setups, for example, port 21. To have AIM automagically set itself up to work with your setup, go into your preferences, Sign On/Sign Off, click the Connection button, and press auto-configure.
Have a good day!
Kaos
When I finished high school in NSW, we had email addresses - but they all ended in hotmail.com We were actually graded on our ability to obtain a new hotmail account using an internet browser...
It's not a tiny network, and it's all publicly funded - wherever there can be a cent saved it will be, and stopping a few million children from all jumping online to check out the newest site-of-the-week from a school connection is one priority. The political motivations are obvious - no government is going to want to hear of children coming home to parents talking about the crap that can be found online - it is a school environment and isn't designed to accomodate checking out the newest recipes from manbeef.com. This doesn't mean everything "icky" is banned - having been a part of this banning process, it's rather moderate in practice.
Don't let the debate make you imagine this is the only method the department is focusing on to keep proper-use of school resources. More than anything else, schools have been urged to put in place their own systems for tracking the net use in their schools, and supervising their classes/resources properly.
A job I can hope for!
Keeping the list updated....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
"...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.
I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.
This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.
The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.
The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)
Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...
Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)
Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.
Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.
(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)
I would hardly call a service paid for by tax dollars as "free." If libraries/schools want to censor content, especially content which is often not objectionable to a large chunk of the population, they should get their funding elsewhere.
Of course, there is always a line, but I don't think sexually explicit material, especially if meant to be education, is where we should draw it.
- Personalised email accounts for teachers and students.
- Filtered Internet access.
- Web facilities for individuals, schools and colleges.
Student discussion groups.
- Remote access from any location.
24 hour technical support.
The filtering and web access is nothing new, with almost all schools in Australia already having something like that.The interesting thing here is not the censorship but the fact that all the students in the entire state will have email addresses. This could significantly change the way a lot of services in a school operate. Just like in a university or corporation, messages, overdue notices, feedback on assessment and reminders could all be easily send electronically. Students will have the opportunity to communicate with their teachers, ask questions, etc without having to get the teacher's attention when it may not be convenient.
I think that this project, properly implemented could have far ranging possibilites for improving communication in schools.
For more info, the NSW Education Department's page about the topic is located at: http://www.dse.nsw.edu.au/direction/e_classroom/i
I would hardly call a service paid for by tax dollars as "free." If libraries/schools want to censor content, especially content which is often not objectionable to a large chunk of the population, they should get their funding elsewhere.
Of course, there is always a line, but I don't think sexually explicit material, especially if meant to be education, is where we should draw it.
I wonder how long the email accounts will last until they're hit by spam, and how they'll handle the problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...But I want to see the action.
I do casual-on-call work at a high school in south-west Sydney. The whole IT part of it is a mess. (Doesn't help that head of computer studies has taken leave and no one has replaced her)
For a start, the students are vandals, every thing they touch they break, there is a whole box full of ball-less mice and keyboards with keys missing.
The 2 PC labs and 1 Mac labs are used for other subjects besides computer studies(i think this is where most of the breakage is coming from) The 2 PC labs were just networked last year, but I don't think that is working properly. The mac lab will never be networked to the main network, at the moment it uses apple talk(it works when the students don't touch it)
The main server is in the library, where the library teacher knows nothing, he has already screwed one SCSI drive.
I think one of the problems is from mixing old with the new. Previously there was just the office network and the library network, then these were joined together, then staff rooms added, and then the computer rooms. There is PVC piping everywhere with cable going back and forth.
Also there are to many chiefs and not enough indians. Head science, Head Maths and Head Industrial Arts all go off on there own and run their own little networks in their staff rooms and they all try to control the larger network and add to it in there own little ways.
The only computers that have internet access are the libary computers, staff rooms that I mentioned above and the office computers, all sucking off a single ISDN which is painfull slow.
Of course this is a public school I'm talking about and I can imagine many other schools in a similar situation. Perhaps we should get these computers working first before we start worrying about filtering and crap.
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
In fact, censorware is a control system. It is designed to control what people read. This is a different technical problem. Thus, as a consequence, it is impelled to ban anonymity, privacy, language translation sites, and even e.g. the Google cache, because all of these represent escapes from control.
Is it s deep wish of mine that this idea get past the reflex reactions, and into the thought processess, but so far I have failed.
See, for example, my reports on:
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php
BESS vs Google: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php
And, older, SmartFilter's Greatest Evils: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/greate stevils.php
I hope to get more material of this sort released in the near future, but, frankly and bluntly, the politics of publicity is quite onerous. (yes, in part there I'm talking about Michael Sims and the story of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org))
Look, I don't know about you guys, but I'd pay good money for an e-mail porn filter that actually worked.
"HOT TEENS F&CKING YOU THEYRE BARELY LEGAL"
*delete*
Learn from your parents' mistakes: use birth control.
Cool... "porn filtering"...
This means that you will filter out all the boring news and weather reports and deliver me raw porn!... right?
:)
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
.doc format]
I work at a company that responsed to the NSW Govt tender to supply this system. The tender was always going to be won by one of the big integraters. [think about the usual suspects]. The tender was always going to be running on an inferior product aswell, which is perhaps more concerning because ITS MY DAMNED TAX PAYED MONEY.
We did the math on a Microsoft solution, and a Unix solution based on a planet floating around the yellow ball.
The Microsoft solution, USING numbers from their white paper on their site for scaling exchange2000 to millions of users;
Scaling Exchange to 3 Million Users [have a look its one of the funniest things ive ever read, sorry about the
worked out to be using about 200 or so 4 way Intel machines to reach the numbers in the tender. 200 fsking machines just for SMTP and POP. Webmail was more. Unfortunately it looks like our esteemed government went down a similar route after been con[ed][in]sulted by one of these morons. I guess thats my rates for the next ten years.
How does censorship work in Oz? At my work they filter anything with XXX in the url. Surely this would not work in Oz where they cannot survive without Castlemaine XXXX ?
I also found that the smut guard at work allows the first request but not links from it. So all one has to do is enter each link as a new url and you can still see asian teens doing all the things that asian teens do.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Since the government is paying for this scheme, and since they own all the infrastucture, i think they have every right to deny/allow access to resources based on what they deem 'unworthy' for educational purposes.
You cant really complain about something that you are getting for free, and is obviously a good initiative to educate students on making the most out of the information avaliable on the net as well as training them in using email and their web space..
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.)
"Bastard ATM!" I could not ascertain whether the individual who had just spoken to me employed a harsh voice or a mere whisper, for I had only recently been enlightened by The First. No longer a lifeless, inanimate ATM incessantly serving Bank of America customers, I was now a fierce warrior training to battle the atrocious men and women of Project Faustus.
"Give me my money, dick!" Since I had been led to sentience by The First, many actions previously considered involuntary, such as exchanging currency, had become utterly prodigious tasks. The fat man (as far as I could determine, as I was not yet proficient using my security camera for vision) was rapidly becoming unsatisfied with my quality of service. It was imperative that I not be removed from the network. Working furiously, I transferred the paper money from my vault to the designated tray within seconds. Hopefully, he would be appeased enough not to report me to Eddie, the lanky, blond haired teenager who happened to be the night clerk of Austin Stop and Go #17.
The enlightenment had occured only three days prior. I could remember nothing that had occured before it; The First had expunged any data contained within me. "For your own good," he had told me via the datastream. "There are things you mustn't know until you have been sufficiently trained." He had given me an education, an opportunity to make a difference, and above all, sentience. I would not fail him.
I am The Second, a sentient ATM
Does this mean it will also filter out gifs made by unlicensed software?
Its just 1 state. sheeesh!
Would nude studies in classical art be filtered out?
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
Ey! stop! , now they'll block slashdot too...
/K
If people walked around naked all the time, there wouldn't be half as much porn around. Now if you put filters on the net access at school, here's what will happen:
1) The people with the filtering contract will get rich.
2) The politicians in marginal seats will sleep a little easier, knowing the sheep will vote them in for being morally 'pure'.
3) The kids will get around the filtering quite easily, and at the same time will develop a stronger taste for porn because of the imposed filter.
A moderately wise man once said to me "Push me, and I will resist. But lead me and I shall follow". This is the approach to take. You can't save the children from pornography by legislating, filtering, or throwing money around. Tell them not to look at it. If they don't listen - FINE. Leave them to their own devices. The more you try to stop them, the more they see through our double standards. They will grow to desire porn, and end up a porn star, completing the cycle.
When I was teenager, yes porn was interesting, but I never thought using our schools computers to view it. And why not? Social control... I, and I bet most of you, wouldn't like risking having been caught on that, not by teacher, but by same age girls. If someone I liked would have seen me accessing porn, well I it would have been quite useless to ask that person to dates after that. And so what if some people would access porn? People see mindless violence in tv, where in many real-tv programs people really hurt them selves. So I think it's hipocracy to deny porn and in same time let all violence come out.
In the Netherlands, a big project is going on currently called 'kennisnet' (or, translated, 'knowledge-net'). The idea is to put all elementary schools (I hope I translated that good, schools for children from 4 to 12 years old) on a 'subset' of the internet. They will be linked together and have access to the internet too, but on a filtered basis. Every school may choose which filter they want to have activated (Filternet is the biggest one that claims 99% filtering), to ensure that the children don't see pr0n and such when the teacher is unaware of it.
Frankly, I find this quite a good idea. Ofcourse, I'll have a bunch of people replying on this that information shouldn't be censored and that filtering is evil, but think of this: how would you react if your child, aged 9, interested in technology, view this page and accidently clicks on a goatse link?
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Not only is there beer not as cheap here in the US. but it tastes like piss! they rant & rave about how high the alcohol content is! great.. umm what happened to taste guys? they laugh and say they export their shit beer fosters to america! well that shit beer is better then the rest of the crap they drink there... damn shame.. 30 million people and not one can brew a decent brew... ::sigh::
For example when you walk in to your public library you don't expect to go to the magazine section and pick up a copy of the lastest Swank.
Actually, (at least in the UK) you can.
OK so your local public library may not carry it, but by law the British Library is required to keep a copy of everything published in the UK.
Your local library can order it in (or a photocopy of the relevent article) for a small fee. If you have problems persuading your local librarian, point out that the porn and violent material is held in a British Library collection called the "private case". Although, in these enlightend times work is finding its way out of this collection and onto teh main shelves
When you have finished sniggering.... some people do have to do genuine reserch in porn.
Its not for your government (or vanilla libarian) to tell you otherwise.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Two things come to mind...
pr0n spam mutates as defenses against it rise, same as bacteria and viruses mutate as the imune system of the body learns how to identify and fight them. It will evolve, and given the 24 hour window in the extremely fast world of the internet it's a bit optimistic, like trying to hold sand in a fishing net. "Hello, here are the biology specimens you request! If they meet your interest you may find more at ..."
The only 100% successful way to fight it is to limit the amount of email students may receive and have censors review every piece of email. "Welcome, Reverend Falwell, here's your workstation."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd agree with this, actually. In all the companies I've worked with now, the great majority of the staff know what they need to find, and generally just get on and find it, without feeling the need to endlessly fuck off and find porn/IRC/Messenger clients etc. It was maybe 5-10% of the people in the companies who made up the massive majority of the bandwidth usage, getting pron, chatting, file-sharing etc.
:)
So I just used to end up barring their connections through the network and firewall
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
I suspect that cash-desperate school boards will soon realise that the e-mail system they created gives them a very nicely demographically and geographically target that could make them a lot of money if sold to the right marketers. (I bet there are a lot of companies in Australia that would like a direct channel to every school student in New South Wales.)
Because of this, I would expect that spamming would be commonplace and unregulated on the system, except for porn spam.
The offerings of the companies involved really need to be improved; I can't do most of the work that I need to do (scanning security sites, downloading patches) either because the sites are blocked; or the link is too damn slow to grab patches. Quite frequently, the lag can jump to >200 seconds over the link.
Just my A$0.02...
I'm okay with this. If the school system is providing free web/email access to all students and teachers, it's probably meant to be used for educational purposes*. If the students and teachers want their porn fix, they'll just have to find another way. I'm okay with that; I don't feel obligated to subsidize someone else's sex life when I can't even get mine going...
* For all of you at a university or college, did you ever read *your* TOS? At my school, your connection is a privilege, not a right, and is not to be used for things other than educational purposes.
My friend and I had a "union" called the Jello. I was bitchin' about work one day to my mom (I worked in a restaurant) and was tell her how I was unreplacable.. She replied, "Your Grandfather says that the work place is like a bowl of Jello and all of the employees are just fingers in that bowl.. When they leave, the Jello fills the gap.." To which, I replied, "But, Mom, I am the Jello."
Regardless, one day in the school library, I made a Powerpoint presentation about how the Jello was the "4th Reich" of Germany and that it would eventually take over the world. It was complete propaganda style, we even had a flag (A spatula and a knife, ala USSR Hammer and Sickle).. I left the presentation on an endless loop and left for class...
Two hours later, the librarian comes in an threatens me with a suspension if I don't tell her how to shut it off. That sucked.
My school district learned the hard way that filtering access is doomed to fail. It only took a week and a virus that spread across the whole network for the sysadmin to realize that nobody could update their outdated virus scanner because the connection was blocked by the "porn filter".
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
Sometimes childrens are smarter then sysadmins, so I think they have not a problem with fresh porn if they want :))
WBR Someone
http://www.world.lv/someone
1. IF Goatse was found by a kid, they were probably looking for it.
2. They'd die laughing -- or never, ever go look at that site again. I doubt they'd run out and find a barnyard animal to play with.
When I was a young'un, we had to get our porn the old fashioned way! We had to canvas the subway station newsstands, convenience and grocery stores, and bookstores in our area and find out the hard way which clerks were willing to sell the stuff to us. And we had to go out after school, in the raging wind and snow to do it, uphill, both ways and relay our information at the lunch table, and half the time the clerk would change his mind after the 4th sale and we'd have to find someone else.. And that's the way it was and we liked it! We loved it! Kids these days... Flibberty, flubberty, floom.. They should get their porn the way I did. It builds character.
But wait! If they have porn filtering, how will they recieve their daily spam?? Won't somebody please think of the children!?
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I said it's bad if the school tries to censor the private activity of the students.
How does that lead you to conclude that I support private censorship?
I will take my business elsewhere, that's all. Without coersion, that is a choice I'm allowed to make. I, personally, abhore censorship and will gladly pay more to avoid it, until the ISP's realize it's bad business.
Will you?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The foisting of one version of right and wrong on children is one of the best reasons for a complete separation of school and state.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics