Re: [MLUG] Getting SSH around despotic firewalls

["Igor Izyumin Jr." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wednesday 13 February 2002 22:00, F Vernon Green wrote:
> I don't know how bad things are for kids as far as getting porn at school.
> I know when I went to school we had playboys in our lockers and such, and
> yes when we got caught at it we got in trouble. But it was part of being
> kids. But we also did not have access to how to make bombs in our library,
> yes if we were ingenious enough and smart enough to use an encyclopedia we
> could have figured it out, but we did not have plans there in front of to
> exactly do it.
Our school had exactly zero problems of this kind in the past couple of 
school years.

> >What do those filters do?  Do they detect sexual content or something?
>
> Ours is built on a service. Essentially the company we bought ours from has
> an army of people that are surfing the web all day. They use guidelines as
> set forth in the federal law and they make lists of all the websites on the
> internet and their IP addresses. They then categorize these sites in a huge
> database that gets downloaded almost nightly to all the IPrism boxes out on
> the internet. The box works essentially as a firewall blocking sites by IP
> address and or domain name. This thing is pretty good, they are pretty much
> up to date, yes some sites get through becuase they are always changing,
> but they are not up for long.
Yes, but a clever student can always use his own private machine which will 
never be blocked by iprism (I use MLUG or my cable modem box - there are 
plenty of these types of services around).

> All this service does is get the school district off the hook, it puts the
> IPrism people on the hook, if we have a student that gets to something
> inappropriate, the district cannot be held liable because it is the
> filtering people that dropped the ball. Sounds good on paper anyway.
I really don't think that anyone should be "on the hook."  If the district 
does not want to be liable for what the students might access on the 
computers, they don't have to provide computers (fine with me).  They could 
implement a release form ("if you use our computers, you promise to not sue 
us").  There are countless things that you can do.  However, wasting money on 
computers that can't be used is just that - wasting money.
-- 
-- Igor
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