Posts

Showing posts from October, 2020

Effectively Internet Filtering in 2020

(To skip my rambling intro and get to the nitty gritties, search this page for, "After that long introduction") In college, back when the internet was young, I hated the clumsy ineffective internet filtering that was in place on campus. It often blocked sites that were perfectly fine, and did not catch all the sites of the type that they were trying to block. Fast forward 10 years or so and I saw my children stumbling upon some content that I didn't want them to see on my unfiltered home internet and my attitude changed a bit. Back then web filtering was pretty easy. Nothing was encrypted and DansGuardian was the go-to tool. You set up a transparent web proxy and DansGuardian would scan the entire content of every website that you downloaded in your home. Incriminating words and phrases would trigger its blocking and it would replace the website you were downloading with an explanatory message. The beauty was that there was no need to scour the web, categorize every web