Websense ****ing ****s

Orion

Is anyone else here in a job that uses *cough* *spit* Websense?

If so, can you tell me if you can get to www.rte.ie/news - it's been blocked here in the last few days. www.rte.ie/sport is ok - can't figure out why they'd block news and leave sport All BBC sites (news, sport, etc.) are all ok.

www.rte.ie/pda/news is fine as a workaround but now I can't directly open pages from my rss reader

c - 13

We have websense in the college here and I can access it without any problems

Stephen

Websense only blocks the categories that your it department wants it to block. Where I work we block all categories like porn, games, chat, gambling sites, online auctions, webmail etc - basically stuff people waste time with when they're supposed to be working, and security hazards (i.e. webmail). I guess that websense either categorises RTE news wrongly, or your websense administrator has specifically blocked the URL http://www.rte.ie/news.

zuma

Just use a proxy...simple!

Well it was that simple a couple of years ago....not sure now though!

^whitey^

Stephen wrote:

basically stuff people waste time with when they're supposed to be working, and security hazards (i.e. webmail).

Didn't realise webmail was much of a security hazard. How is that? Would ye alow access to encrypted services like GMail?

kippy

Webmail is a hazard as users can open attachments from webmail. Downloading all sorts of nonsense and crap that could cause damage to a corporate network. Its not so much about the encryption.
Although, every company has different policies, many allow webmail access.

Generally all the proxy sites are blocked as well so there is no way out without going through websense.
Perhaps your admins blocked the RTE sites by mistake. Either way unless you have a business reason to access it I wouldnt think about asking them to unblock it.
Kippy

^whitey^

kippy wrote:

Webmail is a hazard as users can open attachments from webmail. Downloading all sorts of nonsense and crap that could cause damage to a corporate network. Its not so much about the encryption.

Ah, yea I should have thought of that.

rogue-entity

Personaly I cant stand Websense, and not because it blocks some sites I like to access from the college (I just look them up at home instead) but because it is just not very effective. It overblocks or underblocks because it lacks flexability. And it is commercial. I would recommend to any corporate admins that they impliament a DansGuardian + Squid + IPTables solution that is much more powerful, flexable and most important, lower costing.

Censornet is an amalgamation of these programs with a tidy web-interface and the additional ability to block pornographic pictures regardless of weither or not the origionating server is blocked. It uses some form of image recognition and is claimed to be very effective.

In regards to the OP's post, most web proxy sites will be blocked by websense although entering the IP of the site rather then the domain name may let you in because Websense only looks at URLs. Another effective measure is to install a proxy script on a webserver and just use that to fetch the pages blocked by WS. Also good is the classic SSH tunnel.

^whitey^

I guess websense is ideal for lazy admins who have the budget to afford it.

kippy

Never had a problem with it.
Ran it with over 5000 connections to the net through it.
Yeah its easy to implement, some of the solutions mentioned above take ages and ages to configure and more importantly to keep up to date.
I think you'll find the "Lower costing" to get these in place does not work over the lifetime of the products when you need to spend so much time updating and configuring them.
Also, I dont think there is anything wrong with a commercial product.
Kippy

Orion

rogue-entity wrote:

In regards to the OP's post, most web proxy sites will be blocked by websense although entering the IP of the site r

What I usually do is use a dyndns alias. (boards.dyndns.org is widely used )

I just can't understand why rte news is blocked when rte sport isn't. It must be under a category other than News as no other news site that I've tried is blocked. I can use rte.ie/pda/news or set up a dyndns alias but the pita is that I use Smartreader for rss feeds and the links on the feeds are to the real address