It seems that some of you have a bit of confusion about our internet filtering system so, it's time to review a little bit about some of the pages you might see with our 8e6 filtering system. 

Web Access Authentication

   This page signifies that you simply need to login. Generally, when a user logs in to a computer a small program is initiated that takes care of authenticating you to the 8e6 system. If, for some reason, this small program fails to initiate you will be prompted to authenticate with the web page above. Simply enter your normal computer login and password. A second web page will open that must remain open that contains your user name; leave it open. Of course, if you get this page, you can always log off the computer and log back in to initiate the authentication program.

 Categorical Classification

   8e6 filters internet requests that users make. All users are filtered through 8e6 and their requests are compared to a list of approved categories. Still, you might occassionally see a page as above that says Category:  PASSED. If you get this page, you are not being "blocked".  This simply means that the page has not been placed into a category by 8e6 systems either because it is obscure or new; either way, it is unknown to 8e6 systems. If you get this page you should submit an Internet Site Use Request Form and note that it is "Uncategorized".

 ACCESS DENIED!

Not all categories are allowed, though, and sometimes you may get this page. This page is an Access Denied page and it will tell you specifically why. In this instance, the user was denied access to the category "Online Communities".

The Childrens Internet Protection Act (CIPA) of 2000 requires "...the use of filtering or blocking technology by public libraries and elementary and secondary schools...".  Overview of CIPA ACT

[Please Note:  The WCCS Technology Department does not set WCCS policy.]

Some of you have been receiving Delivery Failure notices in your email inbox as of late to items that you never sent. The technology industry has seen this quite a bit, too. This is due to spammers finding your email address or our domain on the internet and sending spam all over the world using your address as the Sender. Sure, you didn't really send it, but the server that receives the spam doesn't know that and sends you a Non-Delivery Report (NDR). Now, some of this would be alleviated if mail server admins would turn off the NDR for known spam, but that is beyond our control.

This "spoofing" phenominon is known as backscatter. 

Backscatter
Backscatter occurs when a Mail Transport Agent (aka email server) sends a bounce to a person who did not really send the email. Spam Links has a good description of Backscatter and why it happens. Essentially, someone is spoofing the Reply-To field in an email. They then send it to a mail server and it bounces not back to the sending server but to the Reply-To address. Thus you may receive hundreds of spam messages this way.

Symantec, in their April 2008 Spam Report, also noted an upward trend in backscatter attacks. So if you are seeing this issue, you are certainly not alone.

http://www.rackaid.com/resources/rackaid-blog/racktips/bounced_email_or_backscatter/

What can I do?

Unfortunately, there is little we can do to stop backscatter. On WCCS's part, we do not propogate the problem as we have disabled notification on this condition; therefore, we are not "backscattering" others. If you know you did not send the message, simply disregard the NDR report. You'll have a happier day.

As a result of the current state of the internet not everyone gets every page they want every time. The internet is a huge place and it is not possible for any vendor to categorize every site.  Also, uncategorized sites are not usually educational or reliable and many are even unsafe. For this reasons students are denied access to sites that are uncategorized.

You’ll notice that the category on this site is PASSED.  This should really read UNCATEGORIZED, but they mean the same thing: the site is not in the 8e6 database.

One thing you should know is that the top 200 uncategorized sites are automatically e-mailed to 8e6 to be categorized automatically.  But that may take some time and you are not assured that your site will be opened in a timely fashion.

So what should you do? 
Simply email Trouble@wccsonline.com with the blocked URL and we will submit the site to 8e6 for review.  They boast a turnaround time of 48 hours, but we have yet to see them take more than 24.  This means that most sites will be opened in 24 hours instead of the week it used to take.

In extremely rare occasions the site does not fit any categories.  Also, we occasionally have sites in a blocked category that we use for an educational purpose.  These few sites will have to be opened using the current internet requests forms.

The last issue was with a few links on Proquest, but it only took ½ hour to correct that issue. 

We have finally replaced two of our three Internet access products. We have added a Cisco Router and increased our bandwidth.  Both of these items  improved our internet access immensely.  The third item is the filtering server.  We have selected the server and are now configuring it.  It is technically in the demo stage but we believe this is the solution that we're going to use.  We will be rolling out for the next couple of weeks. 

As with any new system there may be a few pages which you were used to getting too that you can no longer get too.  With the new product is easy to add these in.  So please do not hesitate to call the help desk.

• Class – is a common-area folder that all students in the class have full rights to. They can create, modify, and delete at will. This is also the area for sharing documents, etc.
• Homework – is the folder for submitting finished work. Students in the class only have rights to create new objects. This means that students can drop finished work into the folder. Once the work is in the folder, the student cannot re-open it, retrieve it, change it, or modify it in any way. This folder is for submitting finished work only.
• Students – is an area that stores a folder for each student in the class. Every student in the class will have a personal folder that no other student can see or get into. This is an area that the student should use for work in progress. The student-owner of the folder has full-rights to his or her own folder only. Make sure you do not allow students to save games, music or video in these folders.
• Teacher – is a storage folder for the teacher only. The teacher is the only person to have any rights to this folder. This area is useful for storing documents for the class, PowerPoint’s for the class, or anything else that is specific to that class.

 As an example, the teacher could store lesson information and assignments in this area for future use. Once the material is covered, the teacher could copy the lesson PowerPoint to the Class folder so that students could access it for review. Students could store research in their Student folder and share the data with their lab partner in the Class folder. Once their work is finished, they could drop a copy of the assignment into the Homework folder. 

The teacher has FULL rights to ALL of the folders for his or her class. This means that the teacher can peruse all of the individual student folders, the homework folder or the class folder. So, if a student turned in an assignment, but realized they forgot an important part, you, as the teacher, could move the file out of the homework folder and back into the class or student’s folder for them. They would just need to re-submit it when finished.

  Students and you will now map a new drive when they log in:  the W-drive. (w:\)  This is how the student will access their class. Upon logging in and opening the W-drive, the student will see a folder called Classes. Within the Classes folder, the student will see class folders of any class they are a member of while being oblivious to all other class folders. (These folders are named exactly as the classes are named with Harmony.) The actual data structure will look a little something like:  

In this example, the student, STCCHS, can see only his student folder and only the classes he belongs to; 5616-01 3D Computer Animation & Visualization and 5716 Web Design I. He could open Class and drop files in Homework. Also, he does not see the folder Teacher.  

 Management

As the teacher, deleted files will become easily recoverable and ownership of inappropriate files will be easily determinable.  If a file suddenly disappears, you will be able to right-click* the folder in which the file resided and choose a Salvage Files option. You may then see all the files deleted in that folder, when they were deleted and who deleted it. No more anonymous maliciousness. You may then highlight a file and salvage it or all deleted files. If a file appears in your class that is inappropriate, you can easily determine who put it there. You already know that only a student in that class could have put it there, but now you will be able to determine exactly who put it there and when. Locate the file in question and right-click* it. From the context menu you should choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box, choose the NetWare Info tab. The owner of the file is located there. 

*NOTE:  You may not have right-click capabilities at this time. We are re-working the group policy to ensure that you will. 

Feel free to familiarize yourselves with this. When you are comfortable, you may choose to have your students begin to use it. We would really like feedback, too, so that we can continue to hone this new concept in managed storage.  

We are currently running demo's of new internet filtering products.  We are working closely with vendors to get the optimum performance for our new system.  We have looked at a product called LightSpeed to replace Astaro,  during our initial test we had to keep some of the functions of the Astaro product on.  The Astaro product, once again, didn't work well with the new product and we had to take it off-line.  We are in the process of ordering a industry standard router from Cisco to replace the remaing functions of Astaro.  We have suspended testing of internet filtering until this product is in place.

 So what about internet access in the mean time?  We have isolated some downloads that were significantly affecting internet access for most of the first tri-mester.  We continue to watch internet bandwidth all day everyday  it's boring, but we have been able to keep a handle on the traffic for a couple of weeks now.