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."
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
It's probably also worth pointing out that
Queensland has had a related facility for
blocking unwanted sites for some time, although
it can be micromanaged at the school administrator
level if desired. From experience, one popular use
is simply to stop massive haemorrhaging of $$ due
to downloading from popular software archives(!)
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"
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
"...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.)
- 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
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))
Cool... "porn filtering"...
This means that you will filter out all the boring news and weather reports and deliver me raw porn!... right?
:)
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.)
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.
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
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.
Block the keywords 'xxx' and 'mp3' from a port-80 web site.
The sequence xxx turns up in a suprising number of contexts unrelated to pornography. e.g. x is sometimes used as a placeholder in numbers to mean any digit...
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
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...
What about if someone wants to do research on abortion, sex education or anything like that? Is it porn because it may mention the word penis or uterus?
What about all the porn on yahoo clubs and msn clubs? Should you block all the clubs or just some of the clubs? How do you determine if the data is porn?
Also what happen when porn gets through and the kids see it? Do you expell the kids cause the filter is broken?
I have no problems with implementing filters, but make sure that they are truely filtering out porn and not just censoring data. Think about it, what is to stop someone from adding in to these filters information on being a gay teen, or puberty information where a kid may feel more comfortable looking up info on the web than talking with his parents or teachers.
Only 'flamers' flame!
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.
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