Google to Offer Encrypted Search This Week

[enjay]

InPrivate only stops history being stored on the browser. The traffic still has to go through your proxy, and will still be picked up by central filtering and logging systems.

We use an upstream proxy, so all we have for traffic monitoring is RM's Web Monitor product, and that can't see any activity while using InPrivate.

[Arthur]

SSL has been enabled.

[tom_newton]

Missed this thread earlier...
Looks like Google have done the sensible thing and kept images out (for now!) and indeed a cursory check shows that the handful of images you get with text search don't get included for searches for "big boobs" etc.

As John says - you're going to have to do full interception to get 100% performance - however we Smoothwall folk are working on a way to get more out of the HTTPS transatction without having to MITM, even in transparent mode. This may give us URLs - wether it lets us see search terms is site-dependant.

[Arthur]

Google have now moved their encrypted search page to a new domain: https://encrypted.google.com/.

Blocking this will not affect any other Google services.

[enjay]

I'm maybe missing something here, but what's the harm in people running an encrypted search? The results will still be filtering, so all we would lose is the ability to see what search strings people are using, and I can't say I have the time to go through our logs looking at that. Correct me if I'm wrong on this though...

[diggory]

I'm maybe missing something here, but what's the harm in people running an encrypted search? The results will still be filtering, so all we would lose is the ability to see what search strings people are using, and I can't say I have the time to go through our logs looking at that. Correct me if I'm wrong on this though...

Despite the best efforts of the grid filtering services and whatever web filters you have, google trawl a lot of sites, so blocking students searching for particular phrases is fairly useful in stopping them access to harmful sites, before they can find one that has escaped the filters.

Flash gaming sites are a harmless (usually) example of websites that constantly change their domain names to side step filters...

[enjay]

so blocking students searching for particular phrases is fairly useful in stopping them access to harmful sites, before they can find one that has escaped the filters.

Fair point, but do you have time to go through your web logs looking at all the search terms which people have entered?

[diggory]

No, but you can get a filter to block searches, like 'boobies' or 'flash gamez'

[pete]

Fair point, but do you have time to go through your web logs looking at all the search terms which people have entered?

No, but I do get a daily "top search terms", "top blocked users" etc report emailled from the proxy every day. So trends for things that should be blocked but aren't (or are blocked, but shouldn't be) show up pretty quickly.