Smoothwall and Adult Mixed Content reports

[robintech]

Trying to work out why so many students are hitting some domains that are listed as Adult Mixed Content such as media.themoviedb.org without intentionally going there.

 

This gets emailed to the Safeguarding as a report who then work out it wasn't deliberate and ask IT why its happening.

 

My thought is dynamic pages like Bing, live, msn.com are somehow pulling images from these locations which triggers it, these are the domains closest to the Adult Mixed Content domains, timewise

[LeMarchand]

TMDb rarely gets near the top of search results so not sure why it's being flagged without actual visits. I have a vague memory of asking for it to be reclassified when we were on Smoothwall because it is "Adult Content" only in the same way as IMDb (which isn't similarly flagged) in that it lists "adult" films as well as "normal" ones. IMDb does this by default, but TMDb requires you to specify that you want to see such results in your account settings*.

 

*Haven't signed into IMDb since they ditched the forums, so this may have changed.

[sigma]

I did get the exact same problem with Adult Mixed Content with Netsweeper, but it’s only with the thumbnails in image searches. Also alcohol blocks if a pupil searches for a CocaCola image and one is returned by the search engine that happens to be from a site selling alcohol.

 

Google and Bing safe search is much more granular than the categorisation provided by the school filtering providers which seems mainly to work at the domain level, so reasonable results are returned by the search engines, but the school filters have a different opinion.

 

I am allowed to filter out false positives before passing on report data since the DSL has better things to do with her time.

[ibpalle]

For the safeguarding report on the Smoothwall, remember that the instant alert and the notification summary can be enabled separately. My normal recommendation is a daily and weekly summary for all categories with no instant alert and then three additional configurations for instant email alert for abuse, suicide and bullying but no summary notification. Adjust as needed.

[sigma]

Is there any way in the "Smoothawll Portal" (which is all I have access to), for the Safeguarding Reports (which have to be run manually for Suffolk Schools), to have the all safeguarding categories combined into a single report instead of laboriously having to run a report for each Safeguarding Category seperately?

 

An "all" option is not available to us so this is the only way we can access these reports as neither a scheduling option nor instant alerts are availble.

[robintech]

I did get the exact same problem with Adult Mixed Content with Netsweeper, but it’s only with the thumbnails in image searches. Also alcohol blocks if a pupil searches for a CocaCola image and one is returned by the search engine that happens to be from a site selling alcohol.

 

Google and Bing safe search is much more granular than the categorisation provided by the school filtering providers which seems mainly to work at the domain level, so reasonable results are returned by the search engines, but the school filters have a different opinion.

 

I am allowed to filter out false positives before passing on report data since the DSL has better things to do with her time.

 

I think we'll end up excluding the notifications as it seems so random and yet concentrated on one or two domains, we have the rules in place for safe search but they aren't in theory searching for anything at the time. I'll double check anyway.

Even ran an audit log search on 365 in case a teacher had linked an image lazily into a document but nothing that coincided with the notifications.

[CSmith]

@ittech2342323

 

I've made some changes to our categorisation rules so the safeguarding report should be a little less noisy now. Usually in cases such as this it's because the domain is categorised as something which feeds into the safeguarding ruleset and requests are being made for static content (images/css/js) from that domain. We do try to identify this content and prevent it from appearing in the safeguarding reports but there are always edge cases where this doesn't work. If you come across any other entries in your safeguarding reports which you think are erroneous I'd encourage you to submit some blocklist feedback - see https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000223410

[Koldov]

[MENTION=101627]I've made some changes to our categorisation rules so the safeguarding report should be a little less noisy now. [/url]

 

Adult Mixed Content reports can be frustrating, especially when it involves inadvertent triggers like images from dynamic pages.

 

Not Smoothwall related so apologies, but it's an issue for most (all?) filtering systems that categorise websites. We have a system that's built on Netsweeper and regularly get 'Adult' content alerts.

 

We have HTTPS/SSL inspection so I can see the link and it is always something ridiculous like 'funny_cat.jpg' unfortunately the image is linked from a website like 'shutterstock' or 'deviantart' so the image itself may not be 'adult' but the websites host adult images and so are 'correctly' classified as such.

 

I may be accused of 'overblocking' but I've denied both of those websites and cut the alerts by half overnight (luckily our little ones aren't going to lose out by not being able to access those sites).

[sigma]

If you are with SBB (Netsweeper), they have whitelisted gstatic.com which includes all the google image search thumbnails. That overides any category or share list blocks you or SBB may have in place, but Local List blocks (however defined) are still effective. Overall it means that it is Googlesafesearch that determines what is seen in image thumbnails in Google searches, though if pupils click on the lnk to go to the site, category and shared list blocks will be fully functional. Edited June 18, 2024 by sigma