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Ask Slashdot: How To Best Setup a School Internet Filter?
An anonymous reader writes "I was recently volunteered to be the network/computer admin for a small non-profit school. One of the items asked of me had to do with filtering inappropriate content (i.e. stuff you wouldn't want your mother to see). Essentially we want to protect people who aren't able to protect themselves, at least while on campus. Basic site filtering is fairly easy — setup squid with one of the many filtering engines and click to filter the categories your interested. Additionally, making the computer lab highly visible uses public shame and humiliation to limit additional activity. The real question — How do you filter Facebook? There is a lot of great content and features on Facebook, and its a great way to stay in contact with friends, but there is also a potentially dark side. Along with inappropriate content, there is a tendency to share more information than should be shared, and not everyone follows proper security and privacy guidelines. What's the best way to setup campus-wide security/privacy policies for Facebook?"
Just block it all together. Not worth it.
Many years ago I connected an Internet feed for a private girls school - a very conservative, christian, and very well respected one - in Sydney. During the setup I was talking to the Headmistress about if she had any concerns regarding the content the girls might access. I thought her response was particularly enlightened; her comment was something like 'Whatever you try to restrict will make them want to access it more, which they will do secretly and unguided. If we don't make any restrictions then it will never be a big deal, and anything they feel uncomfortable about they can discuss with their teacher. Good kids will know to do the right thing, and all our girls are good.'
If I had a daughter, I probably would have sent her to that school.
This not only the wrong message to children, it's also impossible to outsmart a teen who wants to get on facebook.
... then your school should be teaching kids how to use the Internet safely. There just isn't any technology that will protect your kids from everything they might do wrong.
I suppose you have to block sites that would offend parents (though the kids probably know all about them) but relying on filtering software to keep your kids safe is abdicating the school's responsibility
Don't bother with the filters, stick all the computers in a supervised area and kick out any students who break the rules. Speaking as someone who is personally sick to death of being managed by dumb computer programs (time management and performance evaluating software), why not have a responsible adult present to help guide the students? An old fashioned notion I know, but they are at school after all.
You can't partially-filter Facebook, not in any meaningful or effective way. If you try, you'll fail. Either users have access to it, or they do not.
And for a school (assuming K-12), the hypothetical benefits are massively outweighed by the problems. Not just the content-filtering ones, but the waste-of-resources and distraction-from-task kind. Give kids easy access to Facebook at school, and your computer lab will become a Facebook lab. It serves no educational purpose, and just like the Gameboys, Walkmans, transistor radios, whatever toys earlier kids tried to play with at school that distracted from what they were there for, it's perfectly appropriate to say "not at school".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You're god-damn right it was a scam. The main part of OpenDNS that pissed me off was their filters were created and filled BY THE USERS. And now they're charging for something they got for free. We thought it was going to be a symbiotic relationship but it ended up being a parasite.
How much for a business with 200-220 PCs? $3000 a year.
the flipside to that isn't to make them suffer for your crappy teaching methods
You've missed the point.
Making the kid suffer would be to say something like "so you think its ok, right? Now I'm going to force you outside and force you to suffer".
What the GP did was to allow the kid to teach herself. She let the kid make the decision that the kid wanted to, and see what consequences that led to.
It's actually a really good teaching method: let the kid learn and explore, but be there in the background to make sure that they don't accidently kill themselves or suffer permenant injury.
No lesson sticks quite as well as one hard learned onesself.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes, there's going to be a group of kids who are more determined and resourceful than the person asking. In a nontrivial number of cases, they're called "future sysadmins". That's not to say that they'll all do so or that it should be a motivation for whether things get filtered at all, but it is a byproduct worth mentioning.
That said, you raise an argument of questionable logic. Essentially, you've stated that because he CAN'T block EVERYTHING that he SHOULDN'T block ANYTHING. That's not really the way things work in K-12 education. See, if it takes a proxy, a VPN, and a memorized IP address to get to content deemed inappropriate by the powers that be, then anyone who has gotten to it has shown clear determination to do so. Thus, it's significantly easier for the IT staff to say "We have had filters in place from the get-go that block this content. This student used an incredibly elaborate method to get around these filters, and this method no longer works as we've updated our filters to accommodate it" and thus place blame squarely on the student for determination and intent. Using your method of leaving the floodgates of the internet opened means that answering to those same people when a student accidentally stumbles upon objectionable content will sound like, "we don't have any filters because they don't work 100% of the time". Reference-free job hunting starts in the morning.
If a student wants to get into the building after-hours and orders his own RFID card off the internet and programs it to minic another card to unlock the door, it's going to be much tougher for the school to sue the security company than if the security company left the doors open 24/7 because there are 20-foot high windows.
Sure, students will bring in their issues of Penthouse or USB sticks with the contents of the latest pr0n torrent if they're determined to do so, but once again, it's how and where. A student walking into school with Penthouse in his backpack didn't get it from the school, therefore the school can't be held liable for the actions of the student. If the student downloaded an issue of Penthouse on a school computer, by contrast, now the school has made possible something that (for the sake of argument) the parents find objectionable and it's easy to point the finger at the IT admins since even a basic content filter would have mitigated the issue - or at the very least raised the barrier to entry significantly such that the IT staff can once again say "we can't block everything, but the filters do block all but the most determined attempts to get where he got" and absolve themselves from responsibility.
Yes, supervision absolutely needs to happen. The original post explicitly asks how to make supervision easier for that very reason. The question being asked isn't how to replace adult supervision with a technological solution, it's how to assist the teachers and try to fill in the gaps for the moments when the teacher is focusing on student #1 who happens to be seated at an inconvenient angle to observe student #2 doing the same thing.