School Internet Filters - Reducing the benefits of Internet usage in the schoolplace.

Redisle

For everyone and for mods: I DO NOT want to talk about how to circumvent these filters.

Hey guys,

Im just sitting here in front of a school computer trying to think of reasons why the people responsible for school internet access filtering would block Image searches.. There are other things too..

Firstly, I would love to know if every school in the country is being filtered in the same way. In my school there seems to be two different filters in place, From the looks of the traffic everything is routed to Dublin where it's filtered before reaching the WWW.
There seems to be two filters in place, for example if I visit Youtube I get "The website you have requested has been blocked by the Schools Broadband Network. URL = www.youtube.com/" -- fair enough, they blocked youtube, maybe to save the bandwidth? But really youtube is a very useful educational resource. There are many many vidoes which could act as teaching aids in certain topics.However other less popular video sites like megavideo are not blocked but do not have anywhere near the same amount of content.

The second one is some kind of Fortinet system, I believe the way it works is that all websites are assigned to a category by Fortinet and then the person paying for the service (The Dept of Education I assume) decides which category to block. Please post in the poll to indicate which type of filtering you have, it would be interesting to see.

Now, the real point of this thread. From last week sometime whomever is responsible for choosing which categories to block has decided to block Image Searches! As someone who spends a lot of time in this computer room I have seen many many people come and go making school projects, or reports for a wood project, geo project etc.. Lots of these things, Wood especially, require concepts or other ideas pertaining to the project. Image searches like Google Image search and Yahoo image search were an extremely useful resource to obtain images like this but now they are blocked.. did they even think about those without internet access at home? Not everyone is so fortunate..

Now, I for one am glad that they block certain sites like Bebo and Myspace etc, because I really have no interest in seeing peoples personal lives plastered all over school pc's, but image searches?? What reason could they have for blocking them? You may think of the obvious ones like students looking at pictures which would be deemed nsfw, but 99 percent of those sites are blocked quite effectively by the filtering systems and up to now if someone was to type those kinds of words into an image search they would just get blank boxes because all the hosting sites were blocked...

Sorry for the rant, And in fact it doesn't even effect me much since I only have a few weeks left here but it certainly effects those younger than me..
If you read this whole thing, Thank you.
Please leave your thoughts.
Redisle.

rainbowtrout

We have a block on many websites in the school I work in and we have no control over it. From my experience of teaching students of all ages and that includes adult education, the minute I turn my back on one student to help another, I can guarantee that the students I can't see are trying to access a website that is not of educational use.

true some students may not have internet access at home. However the internet as a useful tool for putting together projects really has only come into popular use in the last number of years. Most students were able to get along fine without it beforehand, taking photos, cutting pictures out of newspapers and magazines. Actually to be honest I examine practical projects and I'm sick of seeing the same projects being handed up by hundreds of students who have just copied everything off the internet.


The internet is for educational use, I don't see that the filters block most of what is needed for students. A few images maybe, but a student should still be able to source them from elsewhere, they managed fine before the internet. Anything else (youtube videos) the teacher can download before class themselves and show to the class. There is no need to let a class of 20 students loose on you tube. At leat 19 of the 20 will try to look at something else anyway.

titan18

We dont have a computer room or computers in our school.Lucky people with computers in school complaining about filtering.Theres always a way around it,not condoning those ways,but if you really want to look at something,you can

Zonda999

Nearly all half interesting sites are blocked on my schools computers.Someone nearly always someone has a way around it though.The sites nearly always get blocked eventually but by then someone has a way around it:D:D.The ones that work are the ones that have https instead of http in front of them

Gavin "shels"

Sure in my school they had wikipedia blocked on the network.:rolleyes: Until I said it to the computer teacher.

Sure if you're that bothered just use an online proxy.;)

rainbowtrout

Zonda999 wrote: »

Nearly all half interesting sites are blocked on my schools computers.Someone nearly always someone has a way around it though.The sites nearly always get blocked eventually but by then someone has a way around it:D:D.The ones that work are the ones that have https instead of http in front of them

I'm guessing that half interesting does not necessarily mean educational?:)

Unfortunately for my students, i also know the ways around blocked sites. And block those too. They get up to very little in my computer lab.

PurpleFistMixer

My school seems to have both of them, though Fortinet is more frequently the irritating one.

Wanted to get images for use in an art project.. needed anatomical references (upper male torso), blocked. My art teacher pointed out afterwards that had I searched for images of Christ on the cross I might not have had the same difficulties.
Youtube blocked, alright I can see this, youtube is not generally educational, but it can be useful for oral preparation, etc., seeing native speakers and all that.
Fortinet occasionally gets some strange ideas... I was once trying to access a page which was about a particular python application used for some kind of mathsy thing... that is to say, something that could be considered pretty low in terms of naked people density. Blocked under pornography. They also block this magazine for some reason.

I'm just glad they don't block SSH. Anything else... sure it's annoying to be blocked access to things I want to see, but I've got a pc at home, so it's not the end of the world.

GLaDOS

The most annoying part of my schools blocking system is blocking sites that are "unrated". I do extra French oral classes with a French guy who has a website set up for vocab and such, naturally its blocked :rolleyes:

rainbowtrout

PurpleFistMixer wrote: »

My school seems to have both of them, though Fortinet is more frequently the irritating one.

Wanted to get images for use in an art project.. needed anatomical references (upper male torso), blocked. My art teacher pointed out afterwards that had I searched for images of Christ on the cross I might not have had the same difficulties.
Youtube blocked, alright I can see this, youtube is not generally educational, but it can be useful for oral preparation, etc., seeing native speakers and all that.
Fortinet occasionally gets some strange ideas... I was once trying to access a page which was about a particular python application used for some kind of mathsy thing... that is to say, something that could be considered pretty low in terms of naked people density. Blocked under pornography. They also block this magazine for some reason.

I'm just glad they don't block SSH. Anything else... sure it's annoying to be blocked access to things I want to see, but I've got a pc at home, so it's not the end of the world.

if you need images for art or for something educational, try asking the computer teacher, there is probably someone assigned as IT Co-ordinator in your school. A temporary lifting of the block can be put in place for say the class that you will be on the internet, or the sites you want to visit.

As a teacher, we come under the same restrictions. Fortinet has to be in place for a whole school network, so our staffroom computers come under the same ban. Religion teachers have a lot of problems accessing information on social issues (alcohol and drugs), home economics the same teaching about health issues - eg breast cancer was blocked, and by the time they've got the block lifted (found me/principal) it's too late and not worth the hassle. I do very little internet work at school as a result and I'm the administrator.

It does have it's purpose - bebo is not an educational website - but it can be frustrating using the internet for genuine reasons and being blocked.

Overheal

ITs have some good blocks on them. Most stuff is blacklisted by category but a lot is specifically blocked/moved into categories. All methods I know of to bypass filtering are in themselves, also blocked, and identified in under a week depending on how well known the bypass is. They did a witch hunt on online proxies very, very quickly.

You can request a site-lift by clicking a link at the bottom of the lock. Then a supervisor gets a notice on his screen and checks up the site: if they decide it merits unblocking then it usually gets done within a day. The staff also have their own usergroup, and as such dont have any browsing restrictions imposed on them that I am aware of.

But you're talking about an IT that appears to run about a half dozen or so Server Towers and has Full-Time technicians operating/maintaining them. The point being your access to the internet is meant to be educational.

spurious

Fortinet are usually quite quick to unblock reported sites.
Something went wrong with it yesterday and it was blocking all images in Google. Hopefully it will be fixed by today.

rainbowtrout

Overheal wrote: »

But you're talking about an IT that appears to run about a half dozen or so Server Towers and has Full-Time technicians operating/maintaining them. The point being your access to the internet is meant to be educational.

It's not in relation to an IT. It's in relation to internet access in secondary schools where it's a lot different... I would love to have a full time IT technician!

Redisle

rainbowtrout wrote: »

if you need images for art or for something educational, try asking the computer teacher, there is probably someone assigned as IT Co-ordinator in your school. A temporary lifting of the block can be put in place for say the class that you will be on the internet, or the sites you want to visit.

My understanding of it is that nobody in the school has any ability to control what is blocked through the fortinet system, the Dept of Edu are paying for the net connection and they decide what is and isn't allowed. Im pretty sure of that because, Im in cork, and if i do a traceroute to any site all the traffic is routed through dublin, Im assuming that this fortinet system is setup in Dublin and that we are all being filtered by the same system, I don't think its possible to allow a student temporary access to sites.Correct me if Im wrong though..

Btw about youtube I think they are probably right to block that, I know if it wasn't blocked everyone would use it constantly and the room would be very noisy and it would slow the internet speed to a crawl (For me anyway, our whole school shares a 2mb Digiweb connection).

I was just surprised when they blocked google and yahoo image seraches.. This seemed like a very useful resource for projects and as I said before any material which you don't want students accessing is independently blocked so even if you search for something of that nature you just get blank boxes.

@ScienceNerd: Im pretty sure the way fortinet works is that the fortinet company puts each and every site on the net into a category, When its unrated it just means they haven't seen it yet and havent categorised it, which is generally the case with new sites. Just click the link on the block page and fill in the form, they usually recategorise it pretty quickly.

@spurious: I think the company fortiguard categorises all the sites and its up to their client (Dept of Edu) to decide which categories are blocked. You can submit a request to fortiguard to have something moved to a different category but I don't think you can ask them the unblock a certain category as thats not their decision. Image search is the right category for Google Images.. so they haven't done anything wrong.

Fad

there this little tab on our browsers we can click which turns off the filter, no one knows about it though

i do however support filtering stuff, like last time i was let loose on the internet for a debate on nano technology i ended up looking at pic of the michael jackson video gama (dont ask how i came accross it i dunno) so itll stop ME getting distracted to easily *shrugs*

teckoda

Our school uses two filters combined. I find it quite annoying, as any un-reviewed sites have to be submitted etc.. which can make it annoying when i try to search for specific content.

Although i setup a proxy for myself. Along with other means of bypassing it.

irish_boy90

only had computers in ty and all we did was e-mail eachother
don't even know what kind of a filter we have

TheBigRedDog

My maths teacher's own website is blocked from accessing on school grounds. Its completly mad as it's flagged as pornographic. Theres nothing of the sort on the page! Not even adds.

But whats very strange is its blocked on the actual server instead of just the computers. My laptop is blocked from youtube etc. while on the wireless in the school (I'm not interested in discussing the financial status of my school btw.) It seems that theres so much effort going in to this service for extremely small return. As said before its much more efficient to research from books and personally than copying and pasting.

SuperSean11

Just use a proxy site.

dmccaff

We have that fortinet crap in our school too.

I just setup my own proxy for me only on my own web space as I use the computers quite frequently, works fine.

devinejay

It's inconvenient alright but with a school full of teenage lads it's unfortunately necessary. A couple of years back there was uproar because some thoughtless tool left a picture of a girl shoving a bottle up her

well, you know

as the screensaver and some poor first year girl was the next to use the computer and she got the fright of her life. It wasn't fair on her and now it's not fair on the rest of us. They have to be vigilant.

drunknmunky_69

WWW.APESEEK.COM gets around sites college have blocked.Stupid bebo-ban form 9 to 5.

K4t

Surely in this and age, some soft porn is grand and doesn't need to be filtered. Sites like Playboy and pussy palace.

These are urgent needs for young pre pubescent teens looking to learn about life and to gain the sex education which is absent in so many of our schools.

PurpleFistMixer

... gain sex education from Playboy.

I seriously hope you are joking.

JC 2K3

Ah school computers....

I used to host a forum with links to the latest cgi proxies that hadn't been blocked on the school network.

I also put a keylogger on one of the computers and gained a considerable amount of bebo/email passwords etc. from it. I never really used any, just liked the power of having them :pac: