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Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the should-students-worry dept.

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

3 of 503 comments (clear)

  1. Narrow thinking by BWJones · · Score: 5, Informative

    Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.

    I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.

    I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.

    It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.

    Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?

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  2. This is most certainly NOT a trend by frequnkn · · Score: 5, Informative

    I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.

  3. Re: part of a disturbing trend? by mamer-retrogamer · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have to deal with WebSense on a daily basis. Yes, "proxy avoidance" sites are blocked, but only ones that they know about. The solution is simple: create your own proxy server outside of the filtered network--and keep it secret.

    The way I did it was download CGIProxy from my home computer and dropped into the cgi-bin directory of an unfiltered remote webserver that I control. Now whenever some seemingly arbitrary site is blocked (usually under the category of "Personal Sites"), I just go to my own personal (and secret) proxy server and enter the blocked URL. Note: you may have to change all text instances of the word "proxy" within the CGIProxy file to something else for it to work.

    MP3 blocking is a little harder to get around, but is possible as WebSense only looks at the extension after the last dot of the filename. The solution is to have your proxy respond to a "fake" URL like "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3.prx" and have it pipe the real file located at "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3" through the fake URL. I've modified my copy of CGIProxy to do just that, and it works like a champ.

    Of course, all this information is for educational purposes only. ;)

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