everyday

Recently I have been working on an internet filter for my work. I work for a school district, so you can imagine that we take internet filtering rather seriously. What I have come across is an unintended side effect of filtering that is causing some rather large sites to be all but useless! I initially encountered this problem with Yahoo!’s image search. The search results are cached on Yahoo!’s own servers, so if a youngster were to search for “bikini” they would be presented with pictures of bikinis being served from Yahoo!’s servers whose original source could be something relatively safe, or something completely inappropriate. While these images are only thumbnails, they can be extremely inappropriate. The only way for me to ensure that these images are not displayed is to block all images from www.yimg.com (Yahoo!’s image server), this wouldn’t be so terribly bad if Yahoo! didn’t use this domain to serve ALL of it’s images and even it’s CSS! The second problem I ran across is sites serving content from a third source. I ran into this when someone complained that the menu images from Walmart.com weren’t showing up. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that Walmart serves it’s menu images from akamai.net, which we block because Akamai hosts everything imaginable. So, my advice to everyone is to not serve content from an untrustworthy source, and to host everything from your own domain, lest ye be blocked.

As many of you know, I work in the IT field. The shop that I am in is all Microsoft, from the servers to the workstations. I recently became a Mac OSX convert as a result of my work with Ruby on Rails. I reached digital nirvana this evening when I was able to rather easily connect to my work’s network via our Cisco VPN and then remotely administer one of Windows servers using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac OSX. This means that I don’t ever, ever, ever, ever need a Windows machine! Yay! (screenshot provided for the naysayers)