Safer Internet Day: 4 Things You Might Not Realise Your Webfilter Can Do

Since it's Safer Internet Day today, I thought i'd use it as an excuse to write a blog post. Regular readers will know I don't usually need an excuse, but I always feel better if I do.

Yesterday, I was talking to our Content Filter team about a post on the popular Edugeek forum, where someone asked "is it possible to block adult content in BBC iPlayer?". Well, with the right web filter, the answer is "yes", but how many people think to even ask the question? Certainly we hadn't thought much about formalising the answer. So I'm going to put together a list of things your web filter should be capable of, but you might not have realised...


1. Blocking adult content on "TV catch up" services like iPlayer. With use of the service soaring, it's important that any use in education is complemented with the right safeguards. We don't need students in class seeing things their parents wouldn't want them watching at home. There's a new section of the Smoothwall blocklist now which will deal with anything on iPlayer that the BBC deem unsuitable for minors.

2. Making Facebook and Twitter "Read Only". These social networks are great fun, and it can be useful to relax the rules a bit to prevent students swarming for 4G. A read-only approach can help reduce the incidence of cyber-bullying and keep users more focused.

3. Stripping the comments out of YouTube. YouTube is a wonderful resource, and the majority of video is pretty safe (use Youtube for Schools if you want to tie that down further — your filter can help you there too). The comments on videos, however, are often at best puerile and at worst downright offensive. Strip out the junk, and leave the learning tool - win win!

4. Busting Google searches back down to HTTP and forcing SafeSearch. Everybody appreciates a secure service, but when Google moved their search engine to HTTPS secure traffic by default, they alienated the education community. With SSL traffic it is much harder to vet search terms, log accesses in detain, and importantly force SafeSearch. Google give you DNS trickery to force the site back into plain HTTP - but that's a pain to implement, especially on a Windows DNS server. Use your web filter to rewrite the requests, and have the best of both.