Thursday, June 19, 2014

Gatekeepers

A senior at one Connecticut high school has asked administrators to explain why he can access websites like Islam-guide.com, the State Democrat site and Planned Parenthood on the school’s computers — but not sites for the NRA, the State GOP or Christianity.com. [More]
Oh, well, it's strictly an efficiency move.  It saves us from having to sic Jinging and Chacha on you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

School year closing soon and this will disappear with the last bell.

Jay in the Book said...

I found it somewhat heartwarming that the Executive Director of Security Product Management for the firewall manufacturer, Dell SonicWALL, said the following in his rather unapologetic blog post on this subject: "Sites that receive the highest traffic (of website visits by real users) are placed at the top of the queue" for being reviewed and rated by a Dell employee. i.e. The conservative sites have more people visiting them than the liberal sites do, so we took the time to give them ratings; whereas the liberal sites are so unpopular, we just couldn't justify the manpower to visit them and rate them!

As a long-time SonicWALL partner and network administrator myself serving dozens of client companies, I found Dell's answer technically logical, though excessively blame-shifting. If he is so serious about his explanation, then he should change their firewalls' default behavior to block "Not Rated" sites rather than subtly blame the school's IT administrator for misconfiguring the firewall.

David Codrea said...

Bounced off that a bit for today's GRE: http://tinyurl.com/n55hgsk

Anonymous said...

That is pretty funny! Anti gun sites don't get much traffic! How insulting to Bloomberg. I am going to check out Alexa and other ranking sites to see if I can verify that, but judging by Facebook and twitter "likes" it is prob true