July 04, 2007

Unknown Internet Filter Filtering Blogs

Attn: Robert Spencer: Yeah I had a similar reports of MPJ being blocked by one of the companies on your list. What I think this is, these companies all use the same internet filter provider. It works like a virus scanner. It goes and gets updates to categories and then blocks those. Companies can also customize the filters to softer or stronger settings. First find out who the filter is. Then find out the reason or category. Common ones are personals and dating, no happyness at work dammit! Also tasteless, sex, games, we don't like you, so on and so forth. Then request from them to be removed from the list. If you get taken off then if will take some time for the new files to make their way around.

People game (false report) these systems. My cube neighbor was blocked from nasa.gov one day this week as "personals and dating".

I don't know which filter is blocking you but I know of one that isn't. If you have any idea who's filter is doing the filtering, we'd appreciate to know who and why.

Posted by: Howie at 03:15 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 190 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Both of these filters block this site:

http://www.barracudanetworks.com
http://www.bsafehome.com/

Posted by: Ortzinator at July 04, 2007 04:51 PM (lXwyd)

2 When a user tries to access a blocked site they should get a warning banner from whatever content filter the company is using. The "Websense" filter for example presents the user with a page that says "Access to this site has been blocked by Websense, blah blah blah".

Most of these content filters work in the same fashion in that they get a master list  of hostile or undesirable sites from the parent server. However, this list is editable by the local administrator, if the admin wants to add Google.com to the blacklist it only takes a few minutes to make it happen. It can also be done by group or by specific user. Got a user spending too much time on Myspace? Block em.

The best thing to do is make find out the content filtering software the company is using and then email the manufacturer and see if your (reportedly blocked) site is on the master list. If it isn't, the local admin is adding it to the blacklist manually.

BTW: These content filters are just proxies that an organization will pipe all of their HTTP traffic through for filtering. The traffic is basically "Users Web Client -> Proxy Filter -> Gateway/Internet".

Posted by: blackflag at July 05, 2007 08:39 AM (Mq5jS)

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