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Web Censorship on the University Campus?
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?"
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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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.
Yeah, and I supposed if you lived before computers and heard of a university prohibiting students access to books that most people had access to and that would be educationally useful, you'd dismiss it with comment about how people used to get their knowledge transmitted orally from the elders, and would it be too much to ask if students just went back to doing that...
I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.
It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.
Perhaps University should be the place where any intelligent net user should learn how to circumvent this sort of thing (an increasingly important academic skill!). Actually, it's pretty simple. All you need to do is [Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to the rest of this comment at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Proxy Avoidance" is filtered]
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.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.