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FOI Request Reveals UK Houses of Parliament Workers' Passion For Adult Content
Anita Hunt (lissnup) writes "Hot on the heels of Dave Cameron's demands to make such content universally 'opt-in,' the Independent reports 'Westminster computers were prevented from accessing sex sites 114,844 times last November alone and on 55,552 in April, while February saw just 15 and in June officials blocked 397 attempts.' No explanation has been offered for the variation, although it would be interesting to know if the fall in the number of recorded/reported attempts coincides with the date the FOI request was filed."
Smells like a virus or malware could have ballooned those large figures.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Boy ain't that the truth! I did a 6 month temp job at a hospital once and one of my jobs was to show nurses how to beat the porn filters! It turned out the PHB who had bought the crap (at an insane markup over a martini lunch from what the rumor mill said) refused to even entertain the thought that his software might be shit but the stupid software would block ANYTHING to do with words like breast or prostrate no matter how many times the IT guys told the stupid software not to, kinda a problem when you have a large part of the hospital dealing with cancer. So I got to go out each morning and show the noobs how to blow past all the filters that the PHB paid insane money to put up, the wonders that is corporate bullshit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You are correct in all counts, I would only add that there is a major source of infection that most geeks around here probably don't even think of that could seriously tilt those numbers...USB drives and sticks.
Working in a little shop I tend to get exposed to more hardware than most and can see trends emerging and in the past few years the number of cheap flash sticks infected with clickjackers and other bugs have frankly gone right through the roof. Since they can no longer count on autorun they instead disguise themselves as "value added" software on the drive, drive security software, free movie players, stuff like that. Many of these bugs are clickjacker variants which for those that have never encountered one are used to commit ad fraud by driving up hits to websites, many of which are porn sites. With a clickjacker you'll see page hits suddenly explode, I have seen clickjackers that would cause hundreds of new windows to open within seconds, talk about dragging a machine to a screeching halt.
So just going by the data we have here, with the number of hits going from over 10,000 to less than a hundred? Sounds like somebody let a clickjacker loose on their network. Feel sorry for the IT guy if that was the case, the new clickjackers are nasty little buggers and pretty damned hard to kill without just wiping everything and starting over. I hope they had a really solid backup strategy in place if that were the case, otherwise talk about a nightmare.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Having seem what sites get blocked, I'll agree with "bogus".
For a long time I couldn't get to the JPL Mars Exploration website, because of three letters in the middle of its URL (which used to be marsexploration.jpl.nasa.gov).
And as for trying to access the old physics preprint server (since renamed to ArXiv): xxx.lanl.gov -- forget it.
(I hate to say what autocorrect just tried to corect "lanl" to...)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I posted this elsewhere too...
Government Spokesperson said: "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users. [There are a] variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software."
So they admit that their own statistics for their own filtering software are probably junk, and yet theyre happy to propose filtering and blocking on ALL of us {UK} because of some statistics about protecting children and the harm of pron.
"Some parliamentary staffers also hit back at the claims, blaming overzealous smut filters for mis-classifying innocent websites: The problem with the Porn Story Parliament Computers thing is that sometimes PICTs filter blocks news stories as pornographic"
Our elected representatives are researching news of the day on a filtered connection that may or may not be providing them with the full range of results. Then they decide if theyre going to be bothered to vote on a motion that they may or may not be fully informed about?
And they wonder why those of us with a least a passing interest and knowledge of how the series of connected tubes works, are telling them that the proposed new laws are a disaster?