YouTube access blocked

Discussions about Internet service providers (ISPs), the Meetinghouse Firewall, wired and wireless networking, usage, management, and support of Meetinghouse Internet
russellhltn
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#11

Post by russellhltn »

What would be nice is if the lds.org webpage could "sense" where the request is coming from and point to the video to the internal storage if it's coming from "inside".

That is adding a layer of complexity, but I'm of the school of thought that it's easier to teach the computer then it is to each every teacher that wants to show a video.
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rickk
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#12

Post by rickk »

Russell,

That is an excellent suggestion and I agree about teaching the computer instead of lots of people. :-) Is there a way to officially request that or is talking about it here the best we can do?

Rick
russellhltn
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#13

Post by russellhltn »

rickk wrote:Is there a way to officially request that or is talking about it here the best we can do?
The "Feedback" link on the main site is the official way.
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rickk
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#14

Post by rickk »

OK - I have tried that before and it went into a black hole, never to see the light of day again. :-) Actually, I think I got a reply to my question about 8 months later and it was a boilerplate that didn't really apply, so I had discounted the usefulness of the link. I will try again.

Rick
russelljd
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#15

Post by russelljd »

This is a great dialog and we appreciate the feedback. The driving factor behind posting these videos via YouTube on LDS.org is that the hope is to raise the number of views on the video in YouTube and make it more visible to a larger audience because of its popularity. It has nothing to do with trying to alleviate load--all of the church's media content is now hosted and delivered through a 3rd party CDN which alleviates any load concerns.
What would be nice is if the lds.org webpage could "sense" where the request is coming from and point to the video to the internal storage if it's coming from "inside".
This indeed would add a significant level of complexity to lds.org. The other problem with this approach is that many members have YouTube blocked in their homes as well and this wouldn't solve the problem for them.

On all of the newer pages that have YouTube embedded in them there is a detect on the page that attempts to see if YouTube is blocked and substitute in the church's own player. We recently discovered a bug in the detect that has to do with caching. We hope to resolve this issue ASAP which should drastically help this issue.
JamesAnderson
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#16

Post by JamesAnderson »

It is possible to configure web filtering to block all but specific pages of a site, such as blocking Farmville on Facebook while leaving the basic Facebook page and profile open. That's just one example.

The Church now has some 800 videos on Youtube and most are on youtube.com/mormonchannel, and the way to allow would be to at the time the vidoe is uploaded, get the resulting URL that you get when you want to share a video, there are two URLs used, youtube.com and youtu.be. Plus the garbage-text stufff that leads directly to the specified video.

The filtering software can be set to 'allow' those through, but if you clicked on a sugested video that was outside the Church videos, you would then get a blocked message. Filtering software varies on that capability, Blue Coat makes it very easy to do so, and I think Websense does but it's somewhat harder to do but is doable.

About four months ago we had a missionary open house, and although we had no nonmembers show up (older part of Provo) to my knowledge, I had taken some of the new mormon.org pass-along cards and had stickers and rubber stamps made with QR codes linking to two Mormon Messages videos on Youtube, since almost every smartphone out there can play them back from Youtube. Someone there tried three times to view one of the videos via the QR code scan, using the meetinghouse wifi, and the filteirng prevented him from viewing the video.
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rbeede
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#17

Post by rbeede »

Well the filtering is done on the local meetinghouse device which won't support third party filtering software anyway. That level of packet inspection is available on more expensive hardware devices, but my experience is that they slow things down and crash often enough to cause service headaches.

The Church could redirect all requests to lds.org over the VPN so the client IP was recognized as on the Church network. Then it would be easier to redirect I suppose.

RussellJD's solution sounds like it is almost done though and will provide this.

Another Suggestion: Add links on the lds.org pages for YouTube and LDS Media.
JamesAnderson
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#18

Post by JamesAnderson »

The retrieval speed issue has come up in the corporate marketing of filtering software products, specifically, Blue Coat says they rely on the cloud, sending back a rating via a server on their end that traffic goes through (proxy?), versus storing a database, usually quite large, on a company-wide LAN server. They claim theirs is much faster than anyone else, but I have no proof of that from them or otherwise. So with corporate-grade filtering and site retrieval speed, the old saying rings true--'your mileage may vary'.

I'm not sure what Websense does, whether it's now cloud-based or whether it still updates a local box in a VPN or LAN, etc. I do know that version 6.1 and newer is updated immediately when it comes to ratings assigned to websites by Websense.

I have no other information on other filtering products as to how they handle the site retrieval speed issue.
Aczlan
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#19

Post by Aczlan »

Another option (which could take a LITTLE bit of doing) would be to whitelist all the church youtube videos in the filter... I realize that it is 800+ videos, but it might be the simplest solution. Have a frequent (daily or weekly) list of all the church YouTube videos added to the "whitelist" for the meetinghouses. Could be done with a shared spreadsheet or website/DB where the people in charge of uploading content add the URL when it goes live. Then someone adds the list to the whitelist.
Another option would be a cron job that runs wget on http://www.youtube.com/user/mormonmessages?ob=#g/u and looks for the "video-url-VxhakjtQrI4" section of the <div class="playnav-item playnav-playlist pinned-item"> div. That would give you a full list of the URLs for the video's which could be automatically added to a whitelist.

Aaron Z
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rbeede
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#20

Post by rbeede »

I believe the current filtering blocks by IP/domain though and not the URL portion. Not positive though.
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