sigma

Northern lights visible in Suffolk this evening.

I'm not exactly following my own suggested guidance "yet", but there should not be too many things to check where it involves visiting a blocked url that would not normally be available to staff. The most important thing is to know the route. We can't know what has been blocked by "safesearch" (applied to everyone), by definition, so nothing to investigate. If an item is blocked but the search engine's "safesearch" said yes, but the filter said no, then if the search argument is reasonable/sensible/not a typo, then there is nothing to investigate. Nobody can be accountable for what a search engine decides to return. The system worked as intended. I had a pupil search for "high". That returned some items blocked "marijuana" from urls that didn't need to be checked to know what they were, as well as reasonable results. The search was random, not repeated by any other pupils or seemingly relevant to the lesson. That generated a safeguarding alert, but still no reason to bypass the filter as the investigation would be around the context of the search argument. The main time there needs to be an investigation of a url is if a user gets a blocked request after a deliberate click on a url where the referrer is not a search engine. Then it would need to be validated before proceeding. I work from home so do these. Our filters’ Porn blocks have been 100% false positive, but that relies on a lot of heavy lifting from “safesearch” as our ISP whitelists all Google Image search thumbnails, even from categories that we have blocked!

WSUS, WUFB whatever?

Probably a corrupted file somewhere, you've tried the usual ? (in an elevated command prompt): net stop wuauserv [Enter] net stop cryptsvc [Enter] net stop bits [Enter] ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old [Enter] ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 Catroot2.old [Enter] net start wuauserv [Enter] net start cryptsvc [Enter] net start bits [Enter]

Are your account setups "complete" for under 13's? This reads as though a Google signup alone won't be sufficient. https://quizlet.com/tos https://quizlet.com/privacy

It’s just the cookie consent box. I don’t know what other sites use it but it will likely work for them as well.

Filtering uniconsent.com gets rid of the consent pop up and the nag. It looks like they’ve changed it since I last looked at it.

I'm interested in your cookie message blocker.

Our oil tank is 2,500l but we dont use that much in a year. We do always fill up in July/Aug though. Same with the woodshed though we should have enough 3 year old logs from our own trees for this winter.

Regardless of the way this topic has been raised. It does seem that Local Authority procurement of MIS systems for schools might not pass the sniff test. (Suffolk CC is migrating all its maintained schools from SIMS to Arbor).

There's a number of nifty little tools from Nirsoft I've used over the years...

Make one. We did one for my sister and in-laws a couple of years ago where they got a small gift every day. Some were naff like a pack of marigold gloves, some much better like a half bottle of Prosecco.

I've not seen it in maintained village Primaries with just 2 or 3 classes and a tech maybe 2 or 3 hours a week or less.

Netsweeper have put it in th "Adult Mixed Content" bucket

Free access for staff, allowed only by referrer header for pupils so that embedded videos play for other sites. It is opened up on a schedule when asked for teachers for particular classrooms by a combination of Netsweeper and Impero. Same for Vimeo or other video hosting platforms. We are a High School with no sixth form.

Yes, definately.

Category alerted to Netsweeper. Anyone on SBB will need to add a decrypt://dafonts.com to their appropriate list if not using mandatory inspection.....

The Zombie Knife ban comes into force today. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nationwide-call-to-surrender-all-zombie-style-knives-and-machetes I can still access sites selling these now illegal items through our pupil filter, but the particular issue is that Google Image search relies entirely on Safesearch as my ISP and filtering provider has whitelisted gstatic.com. Google's American sensibilities doesn't have a problem with guns and knives that are classed as illegal in the UK, so there’s a lot to look at here, most of which I would expect to fall into blocked categories. Are any other filtering providers making a better job of it?

Firstly, I check any reports of updates causing problems, or unintended consequences along the lines of "I updated A and now B doesn't work". Then I roll out things with no reported problems with anything apparently relevant to us and won't need a reboot to my test group - users that will exercise the software, but who wouldn't be phased if we had to swap their device out at short notice in the event of a problem. I work through a group of devices that would cause the least incovenience if they were affected but are used a lot. No point in testing on devices that are not used much. Then one laptop trolley, and staff laptops. Then everything else that needs to be high availability. Whiile that is going on, I'll start on the updates I might have concern about - normally because others might have experienced printing issues, and specifically test the things that others have complained about. Same order. Ususally the Win 10 (LTSC) cumulative updates last, but they may be first depending on what's in them. I do try to put the updates through singly to the oldest or slowest devices to misimise any percieved disruption. I currently don't have any updates outstanding that I've avoided as they have all been superceeded. It does happen sometimes though. Before I joined the school, there was no WSUS setup and nobody did updates for anything ever! I know what I do is a home made roll your own of dubious quality, and I would like to get it properly formalised and more automated. MS don't always pull problematic updates.

We have had a change freeze during the public exam period for anything other than priority remedial work for many years now for anything that can’t be completely isolated. This is a really interesting thread that has rather unsettled some of my previous opinions, although unless there is a change in the allocation of funding to rural state schools, any solution that is a cost option with on costs would be a non starter for us for the time being.

I'd probably take the same line if I had management buy-in.

Not mine. I never patch that quickly except in exceptional circumstances. So, I have tested and nearly finnished rolling out the August Updates in that I'm just waiting for the stragglers to tricke through. I'm not a Microsoft Beta tester, so am happy to let other find and fix the problems first. I will start testing the September updates on 1st October or thereabouts. I am a bit more reckless with Edge updates, and release them one they have been stable for 3 days! I still use WSUS but use a Powershell script that sorts out most client/server sync problems. I will be looking at WSUS alternatives though. I'm not wedded to it exactly.

We’ve had Impero for years.

I first ate in a TGI Fridays in New York in the late 1980s. It was so good we went back again the next night. So much better than what they served in the UK. It was 5 days from Southampton to New York on the old QE2 and each day was 25 hours to account for the time difference.

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