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Google is block pornographic images. Let the censorship begin
I was on reddit today. Ewww I know. And I ran across this thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/14q6ir/censorship_as_of_past_two_hours_google_images/
I decided since I am an adult I must confirm if this is true or not and it is true!
What do you guys think of this?
Comments
Nope. It is still working. Check your safe search option.
Are you in the USA?
Yes.
Not blocked here, in the UK.
Here's a thought: stop using Google Images for porn.
That is what girlfriends are for!
If it's true, good. Google has set up their services in such a way that you cannot effectively block content from google images (or even google images itself) without blocking Google or, at the very least, causing major issues with gmail.
I'm in a terrible position where the network I run (private school) must be kept free from such stuff (what you do at home is your business, what you do here is mine), and Google images has been outside of my reach completely. No way to filter it. The safe search barely even works. I can't bring myself to be upset about any move that fixes this problem for me. Plus it's not like their taking down people's websites if this is true, just filtering content on their own database.
@jarland Can't you do key word filtering?
On the internet, every word is porn.
Lmao. I meant, when you search something on google, it passes those keyword....oh wait, SSL encryption.
Does anyone know if google works without SSL?
They forced SSL on their sites a while back.
Why not have monitoring tools in place instead of blocking every website on the internet, that way if someone does browse to that they can have disciplinary actions taken against them. I hate when schools block crap.... because they usually end up blocking 99% of the internet.
If those are shared computers where you don't need to login, tracking users down would be a pain.
No problem when @jarland is the admin, he could just install root certificates on the client PCs and then MITM SSL connections at the gateway
Ahh. Without SSL, blocking key word would be as easy as catalystvps support is
You are talking about a school where every computer requires a login to the windows domain controller, otherwise you don't have access to the internet.
Minimizing infrastructure to fall more in line with actual budgets, no longer using a domain based network and students have wifi access. Could be done differently, but honestly I don't know why they had to make it so impossible to block google images without blocking google or breaking gmail. Just doesn't work anymore. Should be so simple. Shouldn't have to upscale an entire network infrastructure just to meet such a simple requirement.
I'd rather throw things at them :P
...actually think I might do that, good call.
You guys on a 100/mo budget?
I'm sure everyone is already having to browse through a proxy for you to filter them to begin with. You could always log all requests and then filter for some porn keywords and tie the time and source ip back to a location where the attendance logs should tell you who was where to begin with. You don't need those stupid proxy licenses that block every website on the internet to make it safe for children at school. What is acceptable for an 18 year old in high school might not be acceptable for a 6 year old in kindergarten... but yet the 18 year old is censored to disney.com.
School censoring is worse than the great firewall of china usually.
One more server to keep up, eventually Windows server license should be upgraded. It's an unnecessary expense with little gain from the cost.
OpenDNS at the moment, no proxy.
Only if I snoop SSL traffic, which I guess I'm about to start doing.
This isn't oppressive censorship, this is a paid service. It's an expectation with the paid enrollment in the private school. Inside these doors is an expectation that this won't be stumbled into. It isn't about stopping them from doing it so much as it's about stopping them from accidentally running into it. You can't stop someone who is determined, but a little kid accidentally running into it is a failure on my part. This is a reality with google images, every search can and likely will return pornography at some point, with or without safe search. Doesn't mean I can't be mad at google for making it impossible to block google images without damaging search and gmail. Used to be able to.
Try certain articles on BBC news or parts of Wikipedia :P
You do domains on windows ? I am not sure how to do a PDC on that but I suppose there should be some good tutorials.
I hate windows domains haha. There are alternatives that I have considered, but my focus has been removing what I found to be "excess" in the way things were setup. We had a domain but we had generic user accounts and no one was using any kind of file sharing.
The real concern for me isn't blocking intentional tasks so much as the unintentional stumbling upon pornography. You'd think google had declared war on such simple intentions with their image search. Can't even block the page without blocking google.
Well when I was in school their attitude was "Well if it's blocked that's tough you weren't supposed to see it anyway"...... like @Taylor said it would be something I was researching and I had a limited number of sources due to everything on the internet being blocked. It wasn't a ... oh we just try to keep the bad things out of the internet.... any site that wasn't in their proxy service had to be submitted for a review for categorization or you couldn't visit.
I try to be a bit more relaxed than that. I'm here all day every day and I actually monitor any sites that get blocked. I quickly unblock them if they have any valid use. Most of what the URL filtering helps with is misspellings that could result in malware infested clone sites, websites known to be infected, direct attempts to access porn (really never happens), and things that might hurt network performance (torrents, etc).
So if I'm in the computer lab during lunch I can't play games?
Like you said.. if someone was determined to do something they will do it. That's how I was... if I wanted to do something noone was stopping me, but not everyone is that savvy (and that is why I sold access to facebook (myspace was the thing then)...... but then administration caught on and I was told to stop.)
Only if I say you can :P
So without a domain controller, how do you manage the permissions on each machine? Is there some special login they use that has restrictions that you go in and set on every single computer?
Still thinking of how I'll go about that long term, but right now the lab is 17 computers and it doubles as my office, so control isn't really much of an issue.
They don't appear to be blocked when I use my US vpn, so I think thats a load of crap.
Might be safer and better for everyone if you install debian with gnome3 on every desktop. 1 or 2 Windows machines reserved for photoshop/video editing, that way you don't have to worry about people downloading viruses, then you don't have to have 17 windows licenses and can upgrade and replace hardware without issues.
I reaaalllly want to put Ubuntu on all these things. Thing how much longer they'd last (well let's not think about unity) as fast and functional. I'm having a little bit of trouble with RenWeb software over Wine. It seems to work but then a few functions fail. Managing linux would put me in such a better position though, not having to figure out the Windows based solutions to things I already know how to do.