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Webwasher versus Web Content Creators?
rjnagle asks: "While trying to access a recipe web page of a friend Mary Anne Mohanraj from work, I was dismayed to find that Webwasher, my company's content filtering application, had blocked it. It's true that Mohranraj's site contains some tastefully written text-only erotic stories, (Mohanraj has published several distinguished books and anthologies ), but apparently Webwasher's filtering rules block everything from the domain--including her writing diary, Sri Lanka travel photoessay, poetry and yes, her reading list of Indian writers. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether
employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work. Please answer these questions: How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small
amount of controversial content? Given that Webwasher's corporate customers rarely tweak Webwasher's default blacklist settings, doesn't this imply the need for Webwasher to make their filtering algorithms readily available? (Apparently, even the product's installation
documentation is password-protected). If content filtering programs like Webwasher have a tough time distinguishing between a teacher's educational philosophy and hardcore erotic fiction, shouldn't the software company offer an online form for content creators to appeal being blacklisted? Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens."
Look, dude, I think that her little story entitled "The Survey" more than qualifies as stuff you wouldn't want to discover your boss reading over your shoulder, ok? Quit trying to turn this into a martyr thing, most people don't have explicit sexual themes in their web pages.
Try this: print the stories out and mail them to higher-ups in your company, protesting the fact that they were censored. I think you'll only reinforce the opinion that Webwasher is doing a good job.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So the site contained so-called artistic porn. Are you surprised that a net-nanny style content filter would filter porn???
If webwasher could do it so could spam filters.
We havent managed it with spam filters and I doubt webwasher is going to solve this problem just to suit your (left aside) off-work browsing at work.
To fit your bosses needs, web-washer draws a very blunt line. It cuts out the dirt and the providers of the "dirt". You think its a special class of "dirt" that just looks like the regular dirt but thats OK really because its only enjoyed by people who have the patience to read the full story maybe? I think your boss thinks things are just fine.
So just don't use webwasher at home.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Do what I do;
Download 'putty', and SSH to your home machine.
From there you can run links, epic4, slrn, or basically any other text-based app. Nothing gets filtered, nothing incriminating shows up in the logs at your workplace, nothing ends up in your work cache or your local cache. And if you're worried about the boss walking in run screen first and have a 'top' session running that you can quickly switch to.
The problem is, your workplace is between a rock and a hard place; they can be sued for 'allowing' porn in the workplace but there are simply NO content filters that can reliably decide what is or isn't porn. Hell, even people's views of this differ. The best they can do is just block anything slightly dodgy, and if you really need to go there you'll have to get it all OK'd by the higher-up's.
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webwasher, like most filtering software, uses static "blacklists", so they can't tell if someone really uses a single domain for multiple purposes, or if it's someone using the "not-so-raunchy" bits to do like spam, and intersperse "not blacklisted" material to contour the blacklist.
Unfortunately until some form of dynamic(updated to the minute or less: bandwidth costs for the filtering providers...) blacklisting of pages occur, this type of "block everything unless we know its good" will stay prevalent.
I have to ask why not have this blocked at work? Is this in any way work related? My guess is no. You compare this to Eastern Europe but there is one HUGE difference. You can surf to it on your own computer on your own internet connection on your own time.
Now if your city, state, or nation where blocking it I would say that is wrong. That your company is blocking it is totaly up to them I could also not be surpised if you got a little note from someone when they look at the logs and wonder what the heck you where doing surfing there during work hours.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've written a simple forwarder that works in theory. It will forward a web site and change any or tag (case sensitive) in HTML AND other files to include a base href tag that redirects URLs in the document to the script.
http://home.no.net/david/mirror.php.txt
understand. your company pays a lot of money for their internet connection and for their hardware and software to make the best use of it, and it's being wasted by people like you surfing porn or useless crap not related to your job. Not to mention they are obviously paying you way too much since you are spending your time browsing the internet. Most upper management people still associate IT with being cost centers instead of revenue centers, and it's for this reason. "Well sir, we need to upgrade our T1 to a T3 because our users are surfing porn and trading files on Kazaa". If you owned the business, would you want your employees to be wasting their time surfing the net. Hell no, I wouldn't. It's also reason's like this that corporate America is outsourcing our jobs since we seem so lazy when it comes to working.
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
He posed a very erroneously loaded question based on false premises. If someone asks "How do you screw in a lightbulb," you might expect a literal answer. However, if someone asks "how do you screw in a lightbulb in corrupt communist China where I was oppressed and the bureaucratic barriers to light-bulb screwing resulted in the oppression of the masses and widespread brain-washing," it is perfectly reasonable to give an answer that addresses more than "get screwed."
the case where spam filters incorrectly denies access to your site to a large audience (i.e. its entire product base) and where you lose revenue.
Sorry, the Internet is still voluntary, and hopefully always will be.
Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens.
You don't have to go to Eastern Europe to find a society full of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens. The U.S. does just fine in this production.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work.
But that is the key question. If it was actually blocking work-related material, you could complain to your network manager that Webwasher is blocking content that you should be able to get at. Then, your network manager would either complain to the Webwasher company or switch to a different product.
Given that it is recipes you are trying to read from your work machine, that path is blocked. Therefore, Webwasher works within the requirements of the people who chose to install it, namely your company. Why should anybody unblock anything then?
As a practical solution, use ssh and/or VNC to connect to an outside account and you can do all the surfing you want there.