Copy of Church filters

Where does the Church get its Internet filtering feed configuration for units? Is this something that was created and is maintained by CHQ or do they also subscribe to third party lists?

I was interested in using the same filtering feed for my home and wondered if it was possible to get a weekly updated feed of the same list that the Church uses.

The two big ones are the one the Church uses, Websense, although I've found out they seem to not give importance to filtering adult and pornography sites, although they have most already to a degree. The other one is more suited for the home user, and that is K9 Web Protection, it's free. Don't know of products that use Websense though, although some exist. Blue Coat does a far better job regarding filtering out porn and other undesirable sites, compared to Websense in my opinion.

A third company out there is Fortinet and their FortiGuard filter. I do see it from time to time and they seem to be slightly newer than the other two. I don't know if it appears in any home filtering and security solutions like Websense may and Blue Coat does.

I just found this out, and it is also a very good thing, I know of no one else that is doing this.

Most reputable search engines offer a 'safe search' feature, and while no search engine that has that is completely perfect, one content filtering company has started its own search engine that runs everything by its filters before it shows on your screen, and that is Blue Coat Systems' 'K9 Safe Search'. You can even report anything that gets by as well. Don't know if it uses metacrawler technology where it gets results from multiple search engines, or if only one or two, even which ones they pull search results from.

You can try it at http://www.k9safesearch.com/ Works for image searches too as well as the web.

JamesAnderson wrote:I just found this out, and it is also a very good thing, I know of no one else that is doing this.

Most reputable search engines offer a 'safe search' feature, and while no search engine that has that is completely perfect, one content filtering company has started its own search engine that runs everything by its filters before it shows on your screen, and that is Blue Coat Systems' 'K9 Safe Search'. You can even report anything that gets by as well. Don't know if it uses metacrawler technology where it gets results from multiple search engines, or if only one or two, even which ones they pull search results from.

You can try it at http://www.k9safesearch.com/ Works for image searches too as well as the web.

Both Websense and K9 will soon be replaced with Zscaler. This will also impact the LDSAccess SSID authentication currently used with the Cisco 881ws. Access and authentication will be done via LDS Account and filtering will be provided via Zscaler.

OpenDNS is great for home use in my opinion or if you feel up to it, try Dan's Guardian on Linux. I have found that Astaro works well too.

Any idea what kind of latency and bandwidth slow down will be encountered with ZScaler?

Does Zscaler, like the others, have a URL submission tool? That would be handy in case something did get through that was not caught by the filter, or for submitting spam URLs you get to pre-emptively trap things.

I took a really good look at this. There are some things that don't seem right.

They have a URL lookup tool that only deals with spam, malware, and virus issues. Ran a couple pornography URLs, including one that I fought the spam for in 1997 which resulted due to the efforts of those fighting spam back then, in the original owners of Hotmail suing the pornography site's owners, confirmed still active by Zscaler, and it gave me a 0/100 score for that one. A particularly bad site for malware will get a 100/100 score, even if two or more components go over the top but that is obviously enough. Some country codes, like .ru, .kr, and even .ca, garner points, sometimes enough to be called a serious threat due to major spam gang activity, even if the domain on that country code is totally harmless and innocent of any such activity.

And for purposes of this thread, they have a couple of freebies for anyone to use for such new threats as Facebook 'Like-jacking', shopping safety, etc., but nothing to deal with such a serious threat as pornography.

Here's the site security lookup tool, free to use. http://zulu.zscaler.com/