No the cameras do not stop the vandalism. They simply allow us to identify the culprits and bill their parents for the damage. I believe it's this final step that actually stops the vandalism rather than implementing the cameras.
Yep, sorry. I'll have to come clean on this one. I'm the atypical poacher turned gamekeeper. So yes, I'm always playing a game of virtual chess with myself on my network infrastructure.
Yep, that's a good start. You get points for effort. However I already went through the PHPProxy/CGI:Proxy code and gave all the variable names the form uses a score of 1 million.
Nope sorry, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Your fucking up computers that your fellow students have to use. I'd like to see how that works out on the school yard for you. Failing some peer pressure enter Zoneminder.:)
Sadly your sensible logical position doesn't stick here (Due to a general lack of knowledge of IT). We have a filter (as we are required to have one) thus teachers/parents/the SMT expect it to be perfect. If it isn't it's clearly the IT department (and ultimately me) that is at fault. Sucks I know, but there's only so much I can do against a 1000ft high mountain of technological ignorance.
Hey it's not up to me. I don't make the policy decisions round here. I'd quite like to give the kids large lengths of virtual rope to hang themselves with instead of filtering the crap out of our net connection. But that's simply not the way the wind blows these days.
Indeed, there is a argument to be made here in the UK that government run schools might be violating the pupils/teachers human rights by filtering their internet access while in school. This issue has never been addressed in court yet, but I don't doubt at some point someone with enough money will get round to doing it. If such a hypothetical case is successful a lot of the 'child protection' laws we have (that force us to use these filters) will have to be taken off the books.
Indeed, that's basically what I'm using but I rolled my own. I used Ubuntu 6.06LTS, Squid, Samba (for NTLM Auth), and Dansguardian. Smoothwall takes all the fun^H^H^Hhard work out of it and gives you a nice web interface to manage it.
Well, I'm using a Fujitsu Siemens Dual Opteron with 4Gb of Ram and dual 1GBit NICs at the moment and it's holding up just fine. Any slow down I get seems to be either Active Directory/Samba fucking up (and thus busting NTLM authentication in Squid) or the University screwing up their end of things.
It's a problem of scale. There are around 450 PCs on site and 70 odd laptops. At any one time I can expect about 150 of those being in use, more at lunchtimes, break or after/before school. Nearly all of those teachers/pupils sat on those PCs will have a web browser open for one reason or another. Even if they are just typing something up, they'll habitually have a web browser open just to surf around with in-between paragraphs. So basically, that's a lot of concurrent connections to squid!
The second problem is the huge pipe we have. The UK government in its wisdom has decided to throw a lot of money into subsidising internet access to schools. This means we get a 1Gbit fibre feed that wires into the nearest university and then off down SuperJANET. That's a lot of bandwidth to handle. Now I know most of the time people are web surfing so it's being underutilised. However as with the concurrent connections above, there are some serious spikes in usage of the period of a normal school day.
So basically my point is a $400 beige box wont cut it for the situation we're in here. Sure you can try and do it, but it wont be pleasent. More so when the teachers and pupils complain that the internet is 'slow'.
You're quite correct. I'm in the same situation. Fortunately my problems are slightly smaller scale than you though. So I'm not hitting the same problems. I know who the tech-savvy trouble makers are. I know they find ways round the blocks first and then tell all their mates in the school yard. So I can just stick with monitoring a small handful of kids who are testing the filtering and patch up the gaps as and when they find them. As everything is on-site, we can do this in near real time.
Ok, I can see that being a reasonable option for most people in the short term, but there's two problems with that situation in the long run:
1. It breaks the movie industries business model. A lot of their revenue comes from selling old titles on new formats.
2. What happens when (because of 1) new titles only come on out on HD-DVD?
Indeed, this fact alone makes the more simple firewall rules or web filters useless. They only match based on domains/urls/ips. Kids will get round this rather rapidly.
You have run a full blown http proxy that examines the content of the webpages coming in and make decisions blocking based on that. This is complicated to setup and maintain and/or costly to purchase/outsource.
The protocol. It's basically a Linux+squid proxy. All web traffic coming out of the school comes through this machine. Thus I get fine grained control over access on a user/machine basis.
I do have a layer 2 bridged firewall (again Linux) as well, so potentially I could do some port based firewalling there. But currently I haven't hit a situation where I need to. That box is more there for protecting the schools systems from worms running about on the WAN coming in from another school.
As for filtering... anyone with half a brain can type "SSL tunnel" or something in google.
Nope sorry, no dice there. The kids and I are way ahead of you.:) We only allow HTTPS to domains on a whitelist.
I work in a UK school doing IT support so I have a front line view of what happens.
At a county level we have a fitler that works on basic URL blocking. It's called 'SmartFilter' and it's definately not very 'Smart'. Pupils can easily evade this filter by using CGI:Proxy, PHPProxy, Google Translate or Google Cache for example. Basically as long as the url doesn't match something in it's blacklist, it gets through.
Therefore, at a school level I have implmented a Linux/Squid based proxy with a content filter called DansGuardian. It's a lot more intelligent about filtering and works along the same lines as antispam filters. As well as domain/url blocking it allows grey listing based on the content of the web pages being pulled through it. You assign words or phrases a numerical value and if the page hits a certain score then it's blocked. As the filter is no longer simply relying on the domains/urls this solves the proxy problem.
Yes, some stuff will always get through, I think the above solution is about as good as it gets currently.
I work in a school doing IT work in the UK and basically, It's not that simple.:)
Firstly any in-house IT is line managed by the senior management team in the school, this will include the Head Teacher (equivalent to a Principle in the US). So we absolutely have to do what we're asked to. Even if it's silly. Yes, there's PHB syndrome in local education.:)
Secondly, doing any sort of filtering is not easy. It requires hardware, software and skilled manpower to accomplish. Something underfunded schools are short of.
In no way did I mean that just because the players were cheap and made in China they are somehow inferior quality. Quite the opposite in fact.
For example. I have a DVD player that made by a no-nane Chinese brand, bought for 30UKP (around 60USD). It's not region free but can be unlocked by a magic button press combination on the remote. Instructions for said inputting magic combination were given to me at the shop when I bought it. It plays anything I throw at it. Even half arsed DVD rips that I failed to burn correctly.
On the other hand, my father has an expensive Sony DVD player. It's region locked, doesn't upscale for his HDTV and takes great offence if anything is slightly out of spec on the DVD disc.
Now to bring this vaguely back on topic, from a consumer point of view, which is better? I suspect those without any knowledge of region encoding (or in the case of HD-DVD, DRM) most would simply conclude the more expensive player is 'broken' and opt for the cheaper region free/DRMless player.
Fair enough, at the moment with HD-DVD they do not have a choice. Bottom line is, while the average consumer might not care about their 'digital rights' they dam well care about their shiny new disks working in their shiny new HD-DVD player. This has the same beneficial effect to my mind, the end of DRM. The movie industry pisses off the average consumer at their peril.
I don't see how flashing my HD-DVD drive firmware because its key got revoked is any less onerous than downloading the latest crack from a random P2P network.
Besides we've been here before with DVD region encoding. Everyone got fed up and bought cheap region free DVD players as soon as the Chinese figured out there was a market for them.
They do spam using whispers with trial accounts, advertising the goldselling sites (WTB [Auto-Ignore Whispers From Trial Accounts Option] which would neatly solve that one)
Try UI addon called Spam Sentry for that. It'll block the messages automagically and record them. You can then instruct it to fill out and send a GM request with the relevant information to report the spammer. It'll also let you manually report botters.
Sure, right now it's only 'Pirates' hitting these limitations. However next week/month/year it'll be 'Average Joe User' with his . For example, how much bandwidth does the average Vonage user munch? What happens when IPTV starts to hit mainstream?
The BNP "stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples." The party is "committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948." Accordingly, the BNP proposes "firm but voluntary incentives" to remove ethnic minorities from the UK, advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to "Indigenous Caucasians."
Well there is Blue Pill. However there is some doubt within certain circles as to it's existence. Plus, even if it does exist and work as the author claims it to, it's only a proof of concept piece of malware.
Perhaps all RFC's shoudl work like this, I mean shit, I can make a whole busienss model out of programminn things that, while not 'technically' correct, seem to work.
Slashdot Mirror
No the cameras do not stop the vandalism. They simply allow us to identify the culprits and bill their parents for the damage. I believe it's this final step that actually stops the vandalism rather than implementing the cameras.
Yep, sorry. I'll have to come clean on this one. I'm the atypical poacher turned gamekeeper. So yes, I'm always playing a game of virtual chess with myself on my network infrastructure.
Yep, that's a good start. You get points for effort. However I already went through the PHPProxy/CGI:Proxy code and gave all the variable names the form uses a score of 1 million.
Nope sorry, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Your fucking up computers that your fellow students have to use. I'd like to see how that works out on the school yard for you. Failing some peer pressure enter Zoneminder. :)
Sadly your sensible logical position doesn't stick here (Due to a general lack of knowledge of IT). We have a filter (as we are required to have one) thus teachers/parents/the SMT expect it to be perfect. If it isn't it's clearly the IT department (and ultimately me) that is at fault. Sucks I know, but there's only so much I can do against a 1000ft high mountain of technological ignorance.
Hey it's not up to me. I don't make the policy decisions round here. I'd quite like to give the kids large lengths of virtual rope to hang themselves with instead of filtering the crap out of our net connection. But that's simply not the way the wind blows these days.
Indeed, there is a argument to be made here in the UK that government run schools might be violating the pupils/teachers human rights by filtering their internet access while in school. This issue has never been addressed in court yet, but I don't doubt at some point someone with enough money will get round to doing it. If such a hypothetical case is successful a lot of the 'child protection' laws we have (that force us to use these filters) will have to be taken off the books.
Indeed, that's basically what I'm using but I rolled my own. I used Ubuntu 6.06LTS, Squid, Samba (for NTLM Auth), and Dansguardian. Smoothwall takes all the fun^H^H^Hhard work out of it and gives you a nice web interface to manage it.
Well, I'm using a Fujitsu Siemens Dual Opteron with 4Gb of Ram and dual 1GBit NICs at the moment and it's holding up just fine. Any slow down I get seems to be either Active Directory/Samba fucking up (and thus busting NTLM authentication in Squid) or the University screwing up their end of things.
It's a problem of scale. There are around 450 PCs on site and 70 odd laptops. At any one time I can expect about 150 of those being in use, more at lunchtimes, break or after/before school. Nearly all of those teachers/pupils sat on those PCs will have a web browser open for one reason or another. Even if they are just typing something up, they'll habitually have a web browser open just to surf around with in-between paragraphs. So basically, that's a lot of concurrent connections to squid!
The second problem is the huge pipe we have. The UK government in its wisdom has decided to throw a lot of money into subsidising internet access to schools. This means we get a 1Gbit fibre feed that wires into the nearest university and then off down SuperJANET. That's a lot of bandwidth to handle. Now I know most of the time people are web surfing so it's being underutilised. However as with the concurrent connections above, there are some serious spikes in usage of the period of a normal school day.
So basically my point is a $400 beige box wont cut it for the situation we're in here. Sure you can try and do it, but it wont be pleasent. More so when the teachers and pupils complain that the internet is 'slow'.
You're quite correct. I'm in the same situation. Fortunately my problems are slightly smaller scale than you though. So I'm not hitting the same problems. I know who the tech-savvy trouble makers are. I know they find ways round the blocks first and then tell all their mates in the school yard. So I can just stick with monitoring a small handful of kids who are testing the filtering and patch up the gaps as and when they find them. As everything is on-site, we can do this in near real time.
Ok, I can see that being a reasonable option for most people in the short term, but there's two problems with that situation in the long run:
1. It breaks the movie industries business model. A lot of their revenue comes from selling old titles on new formats.
2. What happens when (because of 1) new titles only come on out on HD-DVD?
Indeed, this fact alone makes the more simple firewall rules or web filters useless. They only match based on domains/urls/ips. Kids will get round this rather rapidly.
You have run a full blown http proxy that examines the content of the webpages coming in and make decisions blocking based on that. This is complicated to setup and maintain and/or costly to purchase/outsource.
The protocol. It's basically a Linux+squid proxy. All web traffic coming out of the school comes through this machine. Thus I get fine grained control over access on a user/machine basis.
I do have a layer 2 bridged firewall (again Linux) as well, so potentially I could do some port based firewalling there. But currently I haven't hit a situation where I need to. That box is more there for protecting the schools systems from worms running about on the WAN coming in from another school.
Hey, I'm an school IT tech. I can't be that useless if I'm posting on slashdot!
As for filtering... anyone with half a brain can type "SSL tunnel" or something in google. :) We only allow HTTPS to domains on a whitelist.
Nope sorry, no dice there. The kids and I are way ahead of you.
I work in a UK school doing IT support so I have a front line view of what happens.
At a county level we have a fitler that works on basic URL blocking. It's called 'SmartFilter' and it's definately not very 'Smart'. Pupils can easily evade this filter by using CGI:Proxy, PHPProxy, Google Translate or Google Cache for example. Basically as long as the url doesn't match something in it's blacklist, it gets through.
Therefore, at a school level I have implmented a Linux/Squid based proxy with a content filter called DansGuardian. It's a lot more intelligent about filtering and works along the same lines as antispam filters. As well as domain/url blocking it allows grey listing based on the content of the web pages being pulled through it. You assign words or phrases a numerical value and if the page hits a certain score then it's blocked. As the filter is no longer simply relying on the domains/urls this solves the proxy problem.
Yes, some stuff will always get through, I think the above solution is about as good as it gets currently.
I work in a school doing IT work in the UK and basically, It's not that simple. :)
:)
Firstly any in-house IT is line managed by the senior management team in the school, this will include the Head Teacher (equivalent to a Principle in the US). So we absolutely have to do what we're asked to. Even if it's silly. Yes, there's PHB syndrome in local education.
Secondly, doing any sort of filtering is not easy. It requires hardware, software and skilled manpower to accomplish. Something underfunded schools are short of.
In no way did I mean that just because the players were cheap and made in China they are somehow inferior quality. Quite the opposite in fact.
For example. I have a DVD player that made by a no-nane Chinese brand, bought for 30UKP (around 60USD). It's not region free but can be unlocked by a magic button press combination on the remote. Instructions for said inputting magic combination were given to me at the shop when I bought it. It plays anything I throw at it. Even half arsed DVD rips that I failed to burn correctly.
On the other hand, my father has an expensive Sony DVD player. It's region locked, doesn't upscale for his HDTV and takes great offence if anything is slightly out of spec on the DVD disc.
Now to bring this vaguely back on topic, from a consumer point of view, which is better? I suspect those without any knowledge of region encoding (or in the case of HD-DVD, DRM) most would simply conclude the more expensive player is 'broken' and opt for the cheaper region free/DRMless player.
Fair enough, at the moment with HD-DVD they do not have a choice. Bottom line is, while the average consumer might not care about their 'digital rights' they dam well care about their shiny new disks working in their shiny new HD-DVD player. This has the same beneficial effect to my mind, the end of DRM. The movie industry pisses off the average consumer at their peril.
I don't see how flashing my HD-DVD drive firmware because its key got revoked is any less onerous than downloading the latest crack from a random P2P network.
Besides we've been here before with DVD region encoding. Everyone got fed up and bought cheap region free DVD players as soon as the Chinese figured out there was a market for them.
They do spam using whispers with trial accounts, advertising the goldselling sites (WTB [Auto-Ignore Whispers From Trial Accounts Option] which would neatly solve that one)
Try UI addon called Spam Sentry for that. It'll block the messages automagically and record them. You can then instruct it to fill out and send a GM request with the relevant information to report the spammer. It'll also let you manually report botters.
Sure, right now it's only 'Pirates' hitting these limitations. However next week/month/year it'll be 'Average Joe User' with his . For example, how much bandwidth does the average Vonage user munch? What happens when IPTV starts to hit mainstream?
Come back to me when an entire political party bases it's platform around hatred of the Muslims.
Ok, I'll bite. Perhaps you are unaware of the existence of the British National Party.
The BNP "stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples." The party is "committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948." Accordingly, the BNP proposes "firm but voluntary incentives" to remove ethnic minorities from the UK, advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to "Indigenous Caucasians."
Well there is Blue Pill. However there is some doubt within certain circles as to it's existence. Plus, even if it does exist and work as the author claims it to, it's only a proof of concept piece of malware.
Perhaps all RFC's shoudl work like this, I mean shit, I can make a whole busienss model out of programminn things that, while not 'technically' correct, seem to work.
:)
Sounds like Microsofts business model.