W3bbo wrote:
Or do what more progressive places are doing and offer a relativly "unrestricted" service somewhere else, like kiosks in the cafeteria. Sure, block all the pr0n you want, but leave MySpace, Messenger, and other "social" websites available. It's not a classroom, it won't be a disruption. We've been doing that at my place with no issues (heck, the IT guys are even rolling out a free-for-all wifi service in their DMZ)
I tell ya, you would love every school in NSW in Australia then. Ever since the Department of Education and Training decided to act as the state's dictator on which parts of the internet are child safe, and which parts aren't, all control on the internet in schools has been taken away and sites are blocked at the source, the state's proxy. Things like Messenger are therefore banned in every school, and sites parents and teachers deem inappropriate are banned at the state level (Including that RateMyTeacher mentioned earlier). Also, under the scheme, the DET provides email accounts (Using Exchange, thank god for that) to all users and cuts off all web mail accounts.
The filter is also so out of whack that it detects lots of legitimate sites as bad for various reasons. RDP, LogMeIn and various other remote access sites/protocols are also banned (Including online proxies), and there is really no getting around it, short of signing up for your own ISP subscription, which is not going to happen at all.
All this came about two years after I had a very efficient ISA Server setup going really well for our school. We could provide local filtering, logging, caching, access banning and all sorts of things that suited our needs, then the DET brought in this internet nonsense and killed it with their upstream servers, forcing us to rebuild the server as another terminal as it was effectively dead.
Other things it kills, Google image searching is a no-go for anyone under year 11 and there are various other PITA things with it.
So before you start complaining about how bad filtering might be, think of the millions of students in NSW who are screwed at the source for their education.
