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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."
We have a similar situation where I work. There's not much you can do about it, unless you have a solid work-related reason to use a particular blocked web site. At least officially.
What I've done is create a squid proxy on my home system. Then I used proxy auto-configuration file to use that proxy only for sites that I've wanted to visit that are blocked. (I was already using such a file to block advertisements, adding in a section to use a proxy for selected sites was trivial.)
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.
How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content?
Put the possibly objectionable content in one subdomain (e.g., naughty-bits.mamohanraj.com) and the rest in the www subdomain (e.g., www.mamohanraj.com/).
This is of course purely a guess, I've never had the misfortune of going through a content filter.
You asked what the site can do; of course the site's (would-be) visitor can go through a web proxy , or vnc to his own machine at home and run the browser on the remote box (yes, pictures won't come through as well, but wanking is mostly about the imagination, so you'd probably have a better time at it anyway), or ssh to his home box and wget from the home box and then ftp back to the office, or html tunnel through his home box to the site.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Start here: open proxies
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
I thought they only filtered things like sites that talked about breast cancer.
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.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
It's not that hard to get past corporate web filters. Just use SSH tunneling to your home computer & surf the web. Or use one of the many anon. proxies...
Firstly, there's a W3C standard PICS that can be used to provide fine grained content identification, though sadly it is little used.
Secondly, it's obvious to me as someone with legal training that this area is ripe for litigation: i.e. the case where webwasher incorrectly denies access to your site to a large audience (i.e. its entire product base) and where you lose revenue.
If you're reading this from the future and the litigation has already occurred: I told you so.
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.
If you have access to a web server with PHP, all you heed to do is to create a simple PHP document that includes the blocked page.
.
First of all, make your script take the parameter $url. Then make it spit out the entire document up to and including
Then have it spit out (You might have to escape those quotes):
Then have it spit out the rest of the document, and hey presto, your PHP script will act like a mirrored version of whatever page you put into $url.
Of course forms and other dynamic content will not work.
It should spit out the entire document up to and including the head tag.
Then it should insert a base href tag into the head tag of the document you're accessing that points to php_self()?url=$url , which makes your script + the url parameter the base URL for all links and images in the document. Basically, the script is telling your browser to pass any file through itself instead of going to the blocked site.
Then include the rest of the document.
You migth want to add some autodetection so that it doesn't look for head tags in images and such.
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
Having also lived in eastern Europe, it seems to me that such regimes have produced some of the most questioning, cynical and generally skeptical people on the planet. Don't confuse apathy with assent. Not so long ago, most companies I worked for blocked the ENTIRE internet from employee computers, so I really don't care if they're going to filter some minor subset of it. I can do my unfiltered personal surfing at Starbucks on my breaks and at home at night. What's the problem?
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
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.
Domains are cheap. Put the stuff that isn't work/child/whatever safe on a separate domain.
now groups.google.com is blocked, and they tell me they won't unblock it.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
as a manager, i must say that my company filters stuff for a reason. all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources. Respect your employer a bit, for god's sakes. surf on your own time.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
The thing about content filters is that everyone's viewpoints and intentions are different when they come up with the filters. Take these examples: a typical home user, an employee of a 50,000+ employee corporation, a network administrator for a grade school, and a network administrator for a 50,000+ employee corporation. Each of these people have very different needs in a content filter and that is where the problem comes in.
You mention a single website that included some recipies in addition to some erotic material. Supposing I worked for the large corporation and was in charge of tweaking the content filter and that domain name was brought up. After quickly inspecting the website, I don't think that I would hesitate to block the entire site. Looking at the nature of the author of that site, I could see the possibility of the URLs to the erotic material either changing or being more graphic in the future, and the safe way to eliminate those possibilities would be to simply disable the domain. In this situation you have the single author of the website that may be upset if the site is blocked.
Another example would be moderately malicious websites and/or advertising websites. Again, supposing I was a network administrator for any company and we didn't want any of the employees installing any 'malicious' software, I would choose to block sites that tried to install software that I myself deemed 'malicious'. These sites would include n-Case, MyWebSearchBar, WhenU, and many others that offered 'malware' or 'spyware' or any other software that indicated they could possibly be either of these. I actually work for a company where I manage the content filter, and my viewpoint is that I block the entire site if I notice any malicious intentions from it. These 'malicious intentions' can even come in the form of Gator trying to install itself when visiting the site. These immediately get labelled in my book as malicious sites and they are banned entirely. Is this the best way to do it? Maybe or maybe not, but that is my viewpoint on it and it's how I manage the content filter.
Now if I a company that created a web content filter, I would want these same malicious websites blocked by default, however that would probably never happen. Many of those are backed by corporations that could easily file lawsuits against my content filtering company for labelling their site and/or software as 'malware'.
Just some ramblings here, but the basic idea is that everyone has a very different viewpoint when comes to content filtering. Nobody wants their content blocked, but often blocking it fits much better with the viewpoints of those implementing the filters. In the case of erotic material, most everyone that implements a content filter blocks all erotic and pornographic material. It is impossible to make everyone happy when it comes to content filters.