All Sourceforge.net Being Blocked by SmartFilter

An unnamed reader writes: "I just noticed that all sites. '*.sourceforge.net' are being blocked by all corporations using SmartFilter including mine. SmartFilter lists all of them as 'MP3' sites. Below is the error I get. How come they do not block Microsoft? I can download an MP3 player from there, too (Media Player does play MP3s)." Here's the error: "Access is restricted to the site (http://www.sourceforge.net/) you requested. Per the firm's Information Security & Privacy Policy, all Internet browsing is monitored and logged. Please contact the Information Security Center at ext 7114 for more information. SmartFilter Control List category MP3 Sites is restricted. " The aptly named SmartFilterWhere tool shows which sites are painted over by SmartFilter's broad brush; in this case, software development site (and Slashdot sister site) SourceForge is blocked by the latest SmartFilter versions -- 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1 -- but not version 2. You might also be interested in The Censorware Project's analysis of the efficacy of SmartFilter as applied to Utah schools and libraries, or Peacefire's explanation of how and how well SmartFilter works.

Comments

Now's the time....

[Lumpy]

Start blasting this smartfilter as crapware that hinder's productivity and only costs the company money in lost productivity and overspending on worthless software (squid is a better solution than ANY commercial filter/proxy on the planet. oh and it happens to be FREE!)

blast it.... blast it mercilessly people...

take every step to blast ANY non-open-source filtering system....

OH, if anyone tries to tell me that squid is too hard to configure... Please let me smack you.. I never touched squid before in my life... last friday I was mandated to install a filtering system for our intranet (spawned by a user's need to view kiddie porn on company computers) I downloaded and installed squid today... it's working perfect and the porn filters that are freely available work just fine.. if they want to add other "naughty" sites, it takes exactly 30 seconds to add it to a flat-text file... even a MSCE coud do it.

paying for any type of filtering system is pure stupidity and would only be reccomended by incompetent sysadmins/netadmins.

Bullshit, burn bitch, burn!

[Erris]

Unfortunately, in examining logs BEFORE we turned on the filtering, people were doing a great job of acting like children beforehand. Reporting on a days worth of logs on the 'sex' category generated a 150 page (small print) report, covering about 50 employees. These were NOT banner adds and spam mail. After the filter went on, it went to about 20 pages. After a well placed firing for an extreme example, it went down to about 3.

If the program catagorizing your logs was not full of it, your company had serious problems to begin with. Chances are that SmartFilter or some sister program told you just what you wanted to hear. Did you really sample those sites? Did you have another program to verify your employees were really going to those places? Scepticism helps here, because I find it hard to believe that anyplace with 50+ of how_many_hundred_? employees dicking around all day with porn can stay in business for 18 months. The other problem your comany has is you. Your statement, " Most people can get to most the things they want to.." reveals the fact that you don't care if a few can't get what they want or need to do their jobs.

You've got 10,000 employees like I've got half Bill Gates's shares of M$.

This one really cracks me up:

You have to have good, fair policies in place covering Internet usage and trusted individuals with good ethics to see those policies are being followed.

If you trusted them, you would never need a filter, would you? Obviously, you company is filled with people that can't be trusted. It's too bad you don't apply the same scepticism to makers of snake oil. For all that, you still end up combing the logs to improve the filters. Don't you have something better to do? Like provide information services?