Web Filtering

There's a tremendous amount of useful stuff out on the Web. There's also a large amount of degenerate rubbish, and it's disturbing how easy it can be for children to run into grossly unsuitable material by accident (one's daughter searches for "kitten" -- you can imagine).

As a service to faculty members with young children, you can run your Web browser through the ricardo server as a "proxy", and access to pornographic sites will be blocked. (Yes, you generally have to supply credit card info to actually "enter" such sites, but the publicly accessible promotional material can be graphic enough.)

Setting this up is straightforward. I am unfamiliar with Microsoft Internet Explorer and will give instructions here for use with Netscape Communicator -- but I presume that what you do in IE will be quite similar.

  • Start up Netscape, and from the "Edit" menu choose "Preferences".
  • In the box that appears, open the "Advanced" menu and select "Proxies".
  • Click on the radio button marked "Manual proxy configuration" and then click the "View" button.
  • In the new box that appears, type ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu into the field labeled "HTTP Proxy" and type the number 3128 into the "Port:" box alongside.
  • Back out of the open boxes by clicking "OK".

At present this is set to work for computers in the wfu.edu domain and the ibm.net domain (for the IBM Global Network). If you would like me to add other domains for use with other ISPs, please let me know. If you set up the service as described above, and then find that you get an "Access denied" message for any Web site you try to reach, this probably means that you are operating from a domain other than the ones I'm currently supporting.

If you try filtering via ricardo, please let me know if (a) you see unsuitable material getting through (it's difficult to be comprehensive) or (b) you see legitimate material being blocked. I'll try to fix the proxy configuration files appropriately.

Allin Cottrell, 6/23/99.

Technical note: The filtering mechanism on ricardo makes use of two nice pieces of free software, squid (the proxy server itself) and squidGuard, an add-on package for squid that provides the site and content filtering.