Slashdot Mirror


User: micros2

micros2's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2

  1. Tucson School district - censorship problems... on Internet Censorship in Utah Schools & Libraries · · Score: 1

    The Tucson Unified School District (http://www.tusd.k12.az.us) is using a censorship proxy server (websense).

    I was involved in several labs while this was implemented (I am a freelance consultant/student). The District was sued (I seem to remember it was settled or dropped, don't have the exact reference) after students at one high school were suspended for printing and distributing throughout the school some musicale lyrics which the school has banned due to the content of the lyrics. The parents were suing based on the fact that they did not let their kids onto the Internet at home, and it was the schools fault for exposing them to this material. Now the entire districts Internet connection goes through the proxy (proxy.tusd.k12.az.us port 80), this includes all of the districts 102 schools. Also the district mandated that students must not be able to change the settings in the browser to bypass the proxy (they are too lazy to configure the routers to block direct port 80 requests, except to the proxy). This is a real pain for me, because the Linux version of Netscape (even when the preference file is locked and owned by root) allows you to change it during your current session. The proxy server slows down Internet access (two Uswest.net (AlterNet is the backbone for them, most of the time) T1 lines are the districts connection), and has been known to block access to sites that should not be blocked. When I built the linux-based lab at Corbett elementary school, we rearranged the entire lab, so that by being in the back of the room, you could see what was on every student's screen. The best way to monitor Internet usage in a school computer lab is supervision, and remote abilities to close the program (heheh). At the Academic computer center of the community college I attend, many students go to very inappropriate sites. Unfortunately the lab aids don't really want to approach the offenders, and since they are running windows, it's rather hard for them to do anything remotely (i.e. telnet in, do a ps ax | grep netscape, kill -9 Netscape's pid).

  2. Red Hat too big --- maybe on Is Red Hat becoming too powerful? · · Score: 1

    I had an instructor in my network operating systems class (TEC 235 at Pima CC, www.pima.edu), try to tell me that "Red Hat is Linux". I pulled out my laptop running Slackware (my favorite distribution). He still thinks that Red Hat is linux.