Pron blocking: advice ?

yossarin

Hi all,

A friend of mine is having problems with a fellow employee at her work.
this guy is browsing fairly hardcore stuff on a regular basis and she finds it quite annoying.

There is no chance of the company stopping him, so we're going for a more sneaky and technical route. I have no problem with this ethically, and i set up and administer the network so i can do what i bloody well like.

What i'd like to pick your brains over is the existence of discrete and discreet tools for blocking/redirecting.

Net nanny type tools are too obvious - a big "Stop: no porn allowed!" message in a browser will not help - he'll just go somewhere else.

At a most basic level, I was thinking of modifying his IE HOSTS file and redirecting his most frequently visited sites to dead links or christian websites. The trouble with this is that it's not really extensible - there are too many porn sites and HOSTS doesn't allow wildcards like '*sex* -> 127.0.0.1'

Alternativly, I am not sure if the firewall has parental controls build in (its a old belkin). I will be exploring it though.

The final alternative is a old fashioned browser hijack. I could write it in VB or .NET or similar and just get it to look at all outgoing GETs or POSTs to known search engines for keywords and redirect the search (again to the christian websites). This will take a while though so i'm not eager to do it.

My question is: has anyone any experience of this? Is there an easier way?
cheers!

28064212

Why is there no chance of the company stopping him? Surely if you monitor his traffic and present it to management, he's not going to risk getting fired?

Evil Phil

Aye. Failing that your friend could make a complaint of sexual harrasment or you could remove his access all together.

satchmo

Admit it; it's you doing the surfing and you're just trying to save yourself from an eternity in hell.

I know that a lot of the image-based porn blocking software do it by simple tone detection - if the amount of skin-tones in an image is over a certain threshold then it's probably a porn image. It's not exactly foolproof but apparently it works surprisingly well. Conceivably you could process any images that are requested by his IP and replace potentially offending images with donkey porn or something similarly extreme and off-putting (goatse jumps to mind). Would make him think twice... although it could back-fire and start popping up when he's just doing normal surfing on images that are false positives!

It would take a while and some effort to set up; if you're arsed is another matter. I do remember a thread here about skin-tone detection a couple of months ago, would be a good place to start. Processing each image shouldn't be very hard to do, and shouldnt have too much of an impact on server processor time if done properly.

Yeah, it's probably overkill...

The Corinthian

yossarin wrote:

this guy is browsing fairly hardcore stuff on a regular basis and she finds it quite annoying.

Surfing porn, or frankly any kind of personal surfing is inappropriate in the workplace. However, how is his browsing porn annoying your friend? Is he displaying it openly or did she catch him by accident and doesn’t like the idea of him doing so?

If it’s the former, then it is potentially a case of sexual harassment and even if he’s MD, the matter will be taken seriously if raised.

If the latter then, as I said, while it would be inappropriate in the workplace, it would not really be her business any more than it would be your own colleague’s business that you spend half your day posting on Boards.

yossarin

The Corinthian wrote:

Is he displaying it openly or did she catch him by accident and doesn’t like the idea of him doing so?

Its an open office, so he's at the desk next to her.

She's not harassed by this or anything - shes fairly tough. She knows a bit more about his preferences then shes happy with is all. its just getting her down.

you are right though. it's not acceptable.

There is also not much chance of the guy even getting a repremand. its a small tightly knit business (5 people in the office).

I think i'll just try the hosts file for now then go with net nanny if it comes down to it. I quite liked the idea of a browser hijack though

satchmo ! hows Thailand ? we're all waiting on your blog posts !

The Corinthian

yossarin wrote:

She's not harassed by this or anything - shes fairly tough. She knows a bit more about his preferences then shes happy with is all. its just getting her down.

Is she happy with it or not, as you’re being ambiguous. And why doesn’t she just ask him not to in front of her?

rogue-entity

You could do what BT does for kiddie porn, instead of displaying a "porn not allowed/access denied" page you could just return a 404 header and his browser will think the site is down or similarly not found. He will just get a Page Not Found message.
You can do this easily with DansGuardian and Squid running as a proxy between the internet and the office network. You can set this up if you have a spare PC with two network cards and there is no easy way around it.

seamus

If you're the administrator then you need to highlight the importance of web filtering. Point out to the MD (who I assume is your boss) that some people have been seen surfing porn and gambling sites during working hours, wasting his money. Also point out the need to filter out sites which may upload viruses/trojans to your machines, compromising the security of the company's data.

Seriously I can't believe any boss would be so apathetic as to allow surfing of porn during working hours.

The Corinthian

seamus wrote:

Seriously I can't believe any boss would be so apathetic as to allow surfing of porn during working hours.

Unless it is the boss.

mickoneill30

yossarin wrote:

There is also not much chance of the guy even getting a repremand. its a small tightly knit business (5 people in the office).

So what. It's against the law. If she doesn't want to see the items and he's viewing them on his monitor then it's harassment.

Get her to do a bit of surfing too.

http://www.equality.ie/index.asp?locID=108&docID=-1

http://www.equality.ie/index.asp?locID=108&docID=-1

If he won't stop viewing the stuff and his employer won't help her then she can take it up with The Equality Authority. It would probably mean her workplace wouldn't be a fun place to work but I'm sure she'd have to be compensated for it.

yossarin

The Corinthian wrote:

Is she happy with it or not, as you’re being ambiguous. And why doesn’t she just ask him not to in front of her?

she's not happy with it no. My ambigiuity springs from only yesterday realising how much she is not happy with it. She has publically asked this guy not to do it on a few occasions. oh, and its not the boss

seamus wrote:

Seriously I can't believe any boss would be so apathetic as to allow surfing of porn during working hours.

to be fair to the guy its not continual. not that i'm defending him.

I can see your point but there's plenty of such places - usually where there is an old boys network in place. When i was in college it was part of the culture - a lot of the girls got into it and everything. I don't imagine that all of those people just stopped once they started working.
How often have you recieved or forwarded a questionable / NSFW email? it just scales up.

anyway, I'm going to install parental controls on the office modem, or if that fails, directly install net nanny/somthing on his machine.

mickoneill30 - I appreciate your fervour, but why would i do anything that could damage the business or alienate people? thats the last thing she wants to do - she loves working there. thats why she came to me instead of the MD. To steal from terry pratchet, the heavy boots of some equality office would just trample everybody