Reporters Sans Frontièrs (Reporters Without Borders for Press Freedom) have added Australia to the “Under Surveillance List” because of Senator Conroy’s determination to censor the Internet. Even though members of his own Labor Party (how can you trust a political party who misspell their name), most notably Senator Kate Lundy whose motto shows her understanding [...]

The web site for Senator Conroy, the Australian Minister for Censorship, has infringed on copyright and failed to remove the code when requested by the author. As reported by ITWire the DBCDE web site uses a Javascript to generate a “tag cloud. The Javascript was written by Aleks Bochniak who requested on 1 March 2010 [...]

I’ve been busy the last week or so building a new proxy server for Arts & IT Faculty at Bathurst TAFE. We were given a couple of Dell PowerEdge 1850 dual Xeon 3.4GHz CPU rackmount servers so I used one as a new web server and one as a new proxy server replacing a pair [...]

Last week one of the teachers noticed that a student wasn’t paying much attention to lesson and noticed that they had Facebook open. Facebook is one of the sites that is blocked by the Squid/Squidguard Proxy Filtering on the classrooms I manage. I was asked to look into this and to lock out the account [...]

I was forwarded a YouTube video link today – about education delivery, students and technology use in the classroom. The video was created by Mark Wesch and students of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Class of Spring 2007 at Kansas State University.
The video should become compulsory viewing for teachers at TAFE and schools throughout NSW. [...]

Interesting few days trying to sort out what is and what isn’t appropriate on an education network. A site popped up in the SARG report that had a very inappropriate name “becauseyoura#@%$&.com” (Note: Currently the domain or site seems to be down). It generated random insults but also offered to email these insults from the [...]

Whilst reviewing the proxy server logs today one site looked suspicious, especially when it returned a page of Lorem Ipsum text. So I tried “googling” the URL which returned a single site. Following this link gave me a Squid Analysis Report Generator report. I followed base URL address of the site and was presented a [...]

Proxy review Monday again and a generally good result but one item just jumped out of the log file. I review the log file using SARG, the Squid Analysis Report Generator, which scrolls in a web browser at just the right speed to spot problem URLs. Right at the top of the page was “ae8rgp7x.escapeban.com”, [...]

Proxy Monday and a still showing a significant decline in number of sites accessed and a slight reduction bandwidth used. A 20% reduction in the number of sites makes it much easier to manually review the weekly logs and check any suspicious URLs or IP addresses. A couple of proxies were detected and these were [...]

Scanning and searching the SquidGuard Proxy Filtering Logs this week has shown another dramatic reduction in visited sites. The blocking of social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube and Proxy/Redirector sites has reduced the total weekly site count by nearly 2000 over the past two weeks. There has also been a 30% reduction in downloaded [...]