Stan Trevena, IT director for Modesto City Schools, penned The Internet Filtering Battlefield and describes the constant struggle to keep student and faculty behavior inline with the acceptable use policy. This is important to keep students safe and to keep the district out of legal trouble.

It is a great article that explains exactly how users have been bypassing filters over the years. I wanted to disagree on the part about encrypted proxies however:

Encryption brings us to the…

I’m working with a midsize business looking to ditch their Surfcontrol/ISA setup. They want an inline filtering appliance and have already looked at Barracuda and 8e6 Technologies. The problem is they want most of the users filtered transparently (bridge mode proxy) and some using an explicit proxy. Barracuda needs two boxes to do this (one for each mode). 8e6 can’t function as a proxy at all so they would need to set up a proxy that then sends the traffic to 8e6.

This problem is easily…