Filter for Cisco881W Proxys ???

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stephen500
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Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 8:45 am
Location: Chester, England

Filter for Cisco881W Proxys ???

#1

Post by stephen500 »

I know the church is filtering "you tube" and it does work.
However one of our young people managed to circumvent this.
The youth didn't do any thing bad, he was just seeing if he could get round it.
I now need (or with your or global services help) to be smarter and try and find a fix!
He, I guess, would have used a proxy.
Any suggestions on how to stop proxies or other methods being used to circumvent the church's filtering policies.
Stephen Sinclair, STS Chester England Stake.
russellhltn
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Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 2:53 pm
Location: U.S.

#2

Post by russellhltn »

The first thing is to test and make sure the filtering is really in place. On the network, try to go to http://filteraudit.cjclds.net/ and see what results you get.

Are you sure the youth got into YouTube via the church's wireless and not his own dataplan or a unsecured neighbor's wireless?

If it is though the church system, then I'd make a call to Global Services and advise them of the situation. I'm not sure if they have logs they can check to see if they can spot the proxy and report it. I believe by default known proxies are blocked. But if the youth set up his own proxy at home, it's probably not known to any of the filters.
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rbeede
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#3

Post by rbeede »

Filtering will never be able to block everything or every proxy. Your expectation really should be that it will significantly reduce the chance of someone accidentally accessing undesired content versus stopping someone from accessing it on purpose. If somebody wants to access youtube, pornography, or other undesired content no filter can ever stop that without limiting Internet access to only a white list of approved sites and blocking everything else (making it useless and impractical to support).

Even if you block that proxy another could be easily used or Tor or lots of other methods. If you have users that are smart enough to work around the filter they are smart enough to know how to avoid pornography and other undesired sites. They can govern themselves really and should be encouraged to do so via gospel principals. I'd imagine that to be much more effective.

Even though the Church is eventually going to provide wireless access filters based on age/calling (youth versus adults, etc.) even that could be bypassed by a 16-year old with some know how. I would treat the filters as a help to prevent accidental or unwanted content showing up for users. Legally you'd never want to state something that would promise or guarantee to parents that it will block all harmful content to minors as that could put additional liability on the Church.
JamesAnderson
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Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2007 2:03 pm

#4

Post by JamesAnderson »

The matter of sites that help people get around proxies is a major issue, and because of that, most filters that are good will have that category as one you can block, even on home products like K9. I think K9 calls it 'Proxy Avoidance'

The other thing is that the newer the filtering company in terms of how long they have been in business, the less likely it is to have a lot of older sites that are still active, both in the bad content that is out there, and because of that they may still be letting a lot of 'proxy avoidance' sites through that they should not. Even with age, I've found that filtering companies just simply can't see it all regardless of content type, so it is really a hit or miss proposition as to whether any one company has a particular problem website in its filtering database or not.
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