Well part of it is that the teachers are not particularly dilligent...but you try to keep track of a classroom of 40 kids pounding away on their machines. It becomes a debauched flophouse because there are never enough teachers to look over EVERY kid's shoulder.
Additionally, filtering rapidly gets the attention of the users. The first few times they look at playboy.com and get blocked, they get nervous and don't try it any more. They become convinced that there is someone watching their internet usage constantly...and of course there is, it's just a computer.
The teachers understand that filtering is not an exact process, and that filtering is not "declawing", but enabling them to limit usage of the internet to subjects that the local school board deems appropriate. Just as someday the kids will have to obey speed limits on the Interstates, they learn rapidly to drive down the straight and narrow on the Internet as well.
Who's hat did they pull the 1.42GHz chip out of? Nice to see that Apple is catching up to PC's of two years ago in terms of clock speed. Any word on the PowerMac/64?
The easiest solution to all of this is, as soon as you download a file, listen to it. If it's crap, or that stupid "coo-coo" file that you get every once and awhile, DELETE it. The best way to keep these files out is not to propegate them. With millions of hosts on the network, even hundreds of RIAA-produced "dupe" files are nothing in the sea of billions...IF you don't propegate them. They are counting on the mindless millions to download a song, listen and find out it's actually a bad file, and then forget about it. Meanwhile, this file sits in the "My Shared Folder" and get shared to the rest of the world. Listen, Decide...DELETE.
I'm responsible for filtering the internet content of a school district...which is a federal requirement, like it or not. Previously we used SurfControl/SurfPatrol/CyberPatrol/WhateverPatrol, until I determined that we were being extorted for a bit too much money. We (used) to run the proxy on Netware 5...when we upgraded to Netware 6 they wanted lots more money. Even then, we were going to get a product that sucked anyway.
My solution was to take an older machine, sit it in the server room, and run RedHat 8.0, Squid, and Dansguardian. I get blacklists from some nice Norwegians at ftp.ost.eltele.no, and further limit things by using keywords and phrase weighting (nice features of Dansguardian.) There are negative weights for words like "fuck" or "shit"...because, more than likely, these are not to be found in great numbers on pages that are appropriate for the K-12 age bracket. The way the filter works, each word is assigned a weight. "fuck" gets 40 points. If the total of points on a page goes over 80, then it is rejected. "sex" has a weight of 10. So an article on safe sex might be allowed, but "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" would not. Words like "medical" and "research" get negative weights...so if there is an article that mentions sex lots of times, but also includes "medical" and "research"...then it is allowed.
Don't get me wrong...I hate filtering as much as anybody. But coming from a previous school district that had in the past used no filtering, I can tell you that no filtering rapidly becomes a debauched flophouse of goatse.cx and warez. We need filtering, but also need a live mind behind it to make sure it all makes sense. I might add that I have saved a lot of money using Dansguardian and RedHat. Maintenance on the filtering portion is an order of magnitude easier than the ***Patrols that I worked on in the past.
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Well part of it is that the teachers are not particularly dilligent...but you try to keep track of a classroom of 40 kids pounding away on their machines. It becomes a debauched flophouse because there are never enough teachers to look over EVERY kid's shoulder. Additionally, filtering rapidly gets the attention of the users. The first few times they look at playboy.com and get blocked, they get nervous and don't try it any more. They become convinced that there is someone watching their internet usage constantly...and of course there is, it's just a computer. The teachers understand that filtering is not an exact process, and that filtering is not "declawing", but enabling them to limit usage of the internet to subjects that the local school board deems appropriate. Just as someday the kids will have to obey speed limits on the Interstates, they learn rapidly to drive down the straight and narrow on the Internet as well.
Who's hat did they pull the 1.42GHz chip out of? Nice to see that Apple is catching up to PC's of two years ago in terms of clock speed. Any word on the PowerMac/64?
The easiest solution to all of this is, as soon as you download a file, listen to it. If it's crap, or that stupid "coo-coo" file that you get every once and awhile, DELETE it. The best way to keep these files out is not to propegate them. With millions of hosts on the network, even hundreds of RIAA-produced "dupe" files are nothing in the sea of billions...IF you don't propegate them. They are counting on the mindless millions to download a song, listen and find out it's actually a bad file, and then forget about it. Meanwhile, this file sits in the "My Shared Folder" and get shared to the rest of the world. Listen, Decide...DELETE.
I'm responsible for filtering the internet content of a school district...which is a federal requirement, like it or not. Previously we used SurfControl/SurfPatrol/CyberPatrol/WhateverPatrol, until I determined that we were being extorted for a bit too much money. We (used) to run the proxy on Netware 5...when we upgraded to Netware 6 they wanted lots more money. Even then, we were going to get a product that sucked anyway.
My solution was to take an older machine, sit it in the server room, and run RedHat 8.0, Squid, and Dansguardian. I get blacklists from some nice Norwegians at ftp.ost.eltele.no, and further limit things by using keywords and phrase weighting (nice features of Dansguardian.) There are negative weights for words like "fuck" or "shit"...because, more than likely, these are not to be found in great numbers on pages that are appropriate for the K-12 age bracket. The way the filter works, each word is assigned a weight. "fuck" gets 40 points. If the total of points on a page goes over 80, then it is rejected. "sex" has a weight of 10. So an article on safe sex might be allowed, but "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" would not. Words like "medical" and "research" get negative weights...so if there is an article that mentions sex lots of times, but also includes "medical" and "research"...then it is allowed.
Don't get me wrong...I hate filtering as much as anybody. But coming from a previous school district that had in the past used no filtering, I can tell you that no filtering rapidly becomes a debauched flophouse of goatse.cx and warez. We need filtering, but also need a live mind behind it to make sure it all makes sense. I might add that I have saved a lot of money using Dansguardian and RedHat. Maintenance on the filtering portion is an order of magnitude easier than the ***Patrols that I worked on in the past.