Safe URL shorteners

This is an announcement from Lightspeed about two new URL shorteners that are safe, and will therefore not be blocked by the content and security system on our campus network.

In late 2009 Lightspeed Systems noted an increase in the misuse of URL shortening/redirect services (e.g. Tinyurl.com, bit.ly, cli.gs). These are services that take lengthy URLs - often with descriptive attributes embedded by web developers - and make the associated pages available through a shortened web address.
Unfortunately, these services create a couple of problems for school networks. First, they make it possible for users to access proxy servers and circumvent the filter and your policies. Second, these links are used by spammers to hide the true destinations of links in their messages. As a result, Lightspeed Systems changed the category for these sites to the normally blocked Security.proxy category.
Of course, we recognize that there are several reasons that URL shortening can be useful, so we are providing an alternative that schools can use safely: lsurl.me and mbcurl.me. To remain CIPA compliant, we check all submitted URLs against our database and will not shorten URLs that are in our porn or security categories.
Also our shortener works as a re-director, not a proxy, so all shortened URLs are redirected to the requested site and will fall prey to any applicable content filtering policies.
Review "URL Shortener Redirects" on the Lightspeed Wiki to ensure lsurl.me and mbcurl.me are in an allowed category - and that all other URL shortening websites are in a custom-blocked category that redirects access attempts to either lsurl.me or mbcurl.me.

Change to Google Image Search mess individual image filtering

On July 20, 2010, Google introduced a new method to more efficiently return image results and provide an enhanced user experience. However, the results no longer include an individual link for each image. As a result, we are no longer able to provide the policy option to block Google image thumbnails by category.

We are still able to enforce the SafeSearch options with all of Google's search functions including image searching.

We know that Google is making every attempt to only return appropriate images with SafeSearch enabled. In the event an image is improperly returned as a SafeSearch result, you can report this image to Google here (requires Google login):
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?hl=en&pli=1

When you issue a new removal request, you'll be prompted to provide a reason. Conveniently, one of the options is, "Inappropriate content appears in our SafeSearch filtered results."
If you would like to read more about Google's Image searching enhancements, you can find the details on its official blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/ooh-ahh-google-images-presents-nicer.html

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly.
Sincerely,
Rob Chambers
robc@lightspeedsystems.com
Chief Technology Officer
Lightspeed Systems
661.716.7600

Security filter login page

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved as of 2008-11-04, 9:00 AM.

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The normal login option on the security warning page is not available. Instead, you will see a long error message. To fix the error, we have to restart the server. However, since this is likely to affect a very small number of users, and because restarting would temporarily interrupt all Internet traffic, I've decided to wait until non-business hours to do this.

It should be back to normal functionality tomorrow (Tuesday, November 4).

Content filtering issues being resolved today

There has been an issue with the Lightspeed network security system blocking staff access to content that it should allow. This affects only web sites that are allowed for staff but are blocked for students. YouTube is the most prominent example of this.

We have identified the cause of this behavior as being due to the system not knowing if it is staff or students logged in to a particular computer. Today we are deploying a small software program to all the computers, called the Lightspeed User Agent, which will let the network security system know who is logged into the computer so that the proper content filtering settings can be applied.

This should be in effect by tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 14). Until then, if you are blocked from a site, look or a "Login" link near the bottom of the security warning message. Staff can click on it and log in using Novell credentials to access sites that would otherwise be restricted from students.