Flash Games

[ctbjs]

Flash Games coming in on USB Flash Drives/Memory Pens whatever you want to call them are a pain in the proverbial. Could block the USB drives I hear you say, oh yes we could but aren't we taking away tools that are required in this educational age!!

 

Is there any way of preventing these flash games from entering the network or anyone else out there experiencing the same problem. Search your student files for *.swf files above 1Mb, I removed 25Gb worth the other day and now have a very strict Disk Quota in place.

[Geoff]

I would of thought a File restriction policy would of been sufficent.

 

You'll have to set up your machines so the flash drives appear on a predictable and consistent drive letter though (there was a tool recently posted in the Windows forum to do this).

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7358

[NetworkGeezer]

I would of thought a File restriction policy would of been sufficent.

 

You'll have to set up your machines so the flash drives appear on a predictable and consistent drive letter though (there was a tool recently posted in the Windows forum to do this).

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7358

 

The drive mapping isn't necessary if you limit your executable paths %Program Files%, %WINDIR% and SYSVOL

[Geoff]

He's talking about *.swf files though.

[mrforgetful]

I've never found a way to block them because they run in IE which masks them from the restriction policy.

 

You could ban .swf files with an R2 File Filter but then noonw could do ICT work!

[Espada]

Why not just disable flash player? It doesn't affect them using flash in IE only local versions.

[Grommit]

How do you stop the games in Internet Explorer ?

[Geoff]

Well there's a couple of options:

 

1) have some sort of computer control system that allows you/teachers to enable/disable internet access on a per machine basis. Netsupport School for example.

 

2) Ban flash on your proxy (both filetype and mimetype) and then whitelist flash 'educational' sites as required.

[Ric_]

@Espada: That doesn't prevent the games embedded into documents as OLE objects though infortunately.

[Gatt]

@Ric_ - Urgh!! having major problem with kids embedding flash games into Excel sheets - and there is no cure for that one!

 

What's worse is that our school has decided to teach the kids Flash - and want to save it in .SWF format - so guess what's now appearing in their home drives

 

I cant delete all SWF files either due to coursework.