Posted by sarahk closeAuthor: sarahk
Name: Sarah Kane
Email: sarahk@interwork.com
Site: http://www.interwork.com
About: See Authors Posts (47) @ Tue, 26 May 2009 11:00:44 -0400
From Webster’s web filtering blog (read more at www.bloxxwebfilterblog.com)
The BBC has reported that a Scottish teacher who posted messages discussing her pupils on a social networking website is being investigated by her employers. You can read the full story here.
The secondary teacher in Argyll and Bute is understood to have posted up to 38 updates a day on the Twitter site and based on the times of the tweet, many of them were created during the school day.
The council have stated that they block access to all social networking sites, but it’s possible that the teacher managed to bypass the council’s filtering,
Anonymous proxy sites are so readily available and many web filters are so ineffective at blocking them, that for many school IT managers, trying to block them has become almost impossible.
We have had a couple of examples lately where the Bloxx web filtering appliance has been deployed upstream of a schools existing web content filter. The results have even astonished us!
In one instance , where only one school in a large council was being filtered upstream as part of the Bloxx roll-out, the Bloxx web filter analysed, categorised and blocked nearly three hundred requests for proxy sites which had been allowed by the downstream web filter.
Bloxx Tru-View Technology is outstanding at identifying anonymous proxies in real-time, and we have recently enhanced the software to provide even better protection against the growing problem of encrypted proxy sites.
With the rapid creation rate of proxy sites - there are hundreds of new sites created every day - real-time content analysis is now the only viable way to solve the problem. Based on what we have seen recently, older web filtering technologies such as URL databases or keyword scanning, are no longer up to the task and are making it all to easy for students and staff to surf the entire Web whenever they choose.
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