New DNS Filtering Policy

Recently a filtering policy change for meetinghouse DNS was put into place that blocked the following services and more:

Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Spotify
Snapchat
Pandora

We use several of these services in our stake and ward activities. I'm looking for further insight into the reasoning behind these recent changes and a method to express feedback regarding their implementation.

I'm curious about the justification for Spotify and Pandora. I know them as music streaming services. While there might have gospel applications, I don't think they are the only way to accomplish those goals.

russellhltn wrote:I'm curious about the justification for Spotify and Pandora. I know them as music streaming services. While there might have gospel applications, I don't think they are the only way to accomplish those goals.

Spotify specifically we use for YSA dances and to provide background music for activities, etc. I think the problem with blocking some of these sites and services is that it's a Sunday-only focused policy. YSA buildings (and other buildings I imagine) are used for a wide variety of activities throughout the week, not just on Sunday, so these policies really put the members at a disadvantage throughout the week.

If every site that was allowed to be used on the network had to be specifically justified, we would have a white-list policy blocking everything but church sites and maybe a few others.

Assuming the goal was to limit what members are accessing on Sunday via the building internet, I'd be fine if the filter was even set up dynamically. More restrictive on Sunday, less restrictive throughout the rest of the week.

russellhltn wrote:I'm curious about the justification for Spotify and Pandora. I know them as music streaming services. While there might have gospel applications, I don't think they are the only way to accomplish those goals.

Of course there are other ways ways to play music, but why not use Spotify or Pandora? What's wrong with them?
Yes they are streaming music services. What's wrong with streaming music services?

That's my question for each of the filtered apps: What's wrong with this service?

And why suddenly block all the social media channels except for Facebook? Social media is incredibly useful for sharing gospel-related content and we are frequently encouraged to share uplifting content via these channels by the Brethren.

jamiep39 wrote:Spotify specifically we use for YSA dances and to provide background music for activities, etc.

You might want to check the Terms of Service. That may not be copyright-legal.

I know someone plugged in some streaming service for background music for our singles Thanksgiving dinner - complete with ads. Not cool.

It's still confusing as to why the sites were blocked.

Agreed. I can understand blocking sites with video / audio streaming since they tend to be bandwidth hogs, but an explanation would be nice.

russellhltn wrote:I can understand blocking sites with video / audio streaming since they tend to be bandwidth hogs

That's the only reasoning I can see. However, every chapel has different speeds available and in some buildings bandwidth isn't an issue at all. If bandwidth is a concern there should be an additional set of DNS servers and policy for those "bandwidth sensitive" areas and buildings. Or, alternatively, a different policy available to buildings with higher bandwidth that doesn't block those high-bandwidth applications.

I will be having an architectural discussion concerning filtering and how to better serve members using Meetinghouse services and allow additional "nice-to-haves" like pandora, spotify, pinterest...etc at appropriate times. The biggest issue we see is that Meetinghouse bandwidth on Sundays is not primarily used for teaching the gospel. It's used to browse pinterest, facebook, update iphone and android software, snapchat, and others. Less than %25 of the content coming into Meetinghouses has been recorded as LDS related content. We need to be able to use Meetinghouse internet for teaching the Gospel on Sunday and retain the ability to prioritize bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming content from youtube.com, lds.org and mormon.org.....etc. So while during the week we do see that Meetinghouses are used for various activities, the problems being reported are on Sunday when the internet is unusable. Right now there is no way to distinguish between wired or wireless devices nor are there multiple authentications methods to assign different DNS servers. This is something I will be looking into.

@nelsonfam Thanks so much for your reply! I have additional thoughts based on your response, but I'd like to take some writing time to make sure they are explained appropriately. When is your discussion going to take place?

crolse wrote:@nelsonfam Thanks so much for your reply! I have additional thoughts based on your response, but I'd like to take some writing time to make sure they are explained appropriately. When is your discussion going to take place?

No scheduled meetings right now but I would hope after the Thanksgiving holiday.

It would be nice if you could set the filter on say Saturday night to block all those sites and then Monday morning have it removed. Set something up like a cron job.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Terry

harddrive wrote:It would be nice if you could set the filter on say Saturday night to block all those sites and then Monday morning have it removed. Set something up like a cron job.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Terry

Ha, I agree but the service is a world-wide policy attached to a multicast service in dozens of data centers and it's difficult to implement those features. But it's something to discuss. Thanks for the feedback.

nelsonfam wrote: Ha, I agree but the service is a world-wide policy attached to a multicast service in dozens of data centers and it's difficult to implement those features. But it's something to discuss. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the replies! We've definitely experienced those bandwidth issues in our buildings so I can understand that, but we also benefit from using some of the now blocked services throughout the rest of the week. Is the Church still using zScaler? I read up on it once and I seem to remember one of their brochures mentioning that they support time-based DNS filtering. If so, that would be nice to do so we can still use those services throughout the rest of the week.

russellhltn wrote:

jamiep39 wrote:Spotify specifically we use for YSA dances and to provide background music for activities, etc.

You might want to check the Terms of Service. That may not be copyright-legal.

Not to change the subject, but Amen. There is a general disregard when it comes to obeying, honoring, and sustaining copyright law in church settings, especially with regards to music – not just recorded music, but also sheet music. I give the benefit of the doubt in saying that in most cases it is probably just that people don't know – so no hard feelings towards jamiep39 – but this really needs to be brought up more often.

I second the comments above about social media being essential for sharing the gospel. I am curious why Facebook was not blocked but the others were. One great way to share the gospel is to check in on social media at church, tag a few people, put up a photo of you and your fellows in class (before it starts, of course ). Or, to share quotes from the lesson that stand out to you, with your testimony. I don't know the best solution, though, because most social media traffic at church is probably not related to sharing the gospel. I understand why it might be blocked, but I wonder if there's a better solution.

When it comes to blocking YouTube, is it possible to block everything except the official Church channels?

nelsonfam wrote:We need to be able to use Meetinghouse internet for teaching the Gospel on Sunday and retain the ability to prioritize bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming content from youtube.com, ....

Last I knew, YouTube was blocked. Has that changed? I can understand blocking YouTube at large, but some church videos are hosted there. It's also some stake's preferred method of webcasting.

nelsonfam wrote:The biggest issue we see is that Meetinghouse bandwidth on Sundays is not primarily used for teaching the gospel. It's used to browse pinterest, facebook, update iphone and android software, snapchat, and others. Less than %25 of the content coming into Meetinghouses has been recorded as LDS related content. We need to be able to use Meetinghouse internet for teaching the Gospel on Sunday and retain the ability to prioritize bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming content from youtube.com, lds.org and mormon.org.....etc.

Keep in mind that per instructions from HQ, most teachers on Sunday (in our stake, anyway) are pre-loading instructional media onto flash drives or personal devices at home, rather than try to stream during class time. Those choosing to use the internet for non-gospel activities don't affect classroom instruction at all. The only time BW is an issue is when streaming stake conference, and that's easily solved by turning off WiFi access.

Personally, I think you're fighting a losing battle if you think you can stop members from using the internet for personal purposes, without affecting those trying to use those same services for legitimate Gospel activities.

russellhltn wrote:

nelsonfam wrote:We need to be able to use Meetinghouse internet for teaching the Gospel on Sunday and retain the ability to prioritize bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming content from youtube.com, ....

Last I knew, YouTube was blocked. Has that changed? I can understand blocking YouTube at large, but some church videos are hosted there. It's also some stake's preferred method of webcasting.

Youtube.com is still blocked however we are looking at enabling it and forcing the "Restricted Mode" view to limit the amount of questionable content being displayed. PSD has to ensure that videos are categorized correctly and viewable in Restricted mode but this is being explored right now. We want to enable youtube but not all the crap that comes with it.

Google is turning off the Safe Youtube for Schools feature which we were attempting to utilize as well but they are moving away from the "Personalized" service.

Mikerowaved wrote:

nelsonfam wrote:The biggest issue we see is that Meetinghouse bandwidth on Sundays is not primarily used for teaching the gospel. It's used to browse pinterest, facebook, update iphone and android software, snapchat, and others. Less than %25 of the content coming into Meetinghouses has been recorded as LDS related content. We need to be able to use Meetinghouse internet for teaching the Gospel on Sunday and retain the ability to prioritize bandwidth sensitive applications like streaming content from youtube.com, lds.org and mormon.org.....etc.

Keep in mind that per instructions from HQ, most teachers on Sunday (in our stake, anyway) are pre-loading instructional media onto flash drives or personal devices at home, rather than try to stream during class time. Those choosing to use the internet for non-gospel activities don't affect classroom instruction at all. The only time BW is an issue is when streaming stake conference, and that's easily solved by turning off WiFi access.

Personally, I think you're fighting a losing battle if you think you can stop members from using the internet for personal purposes, without affecting those trying to use those same services for legitimate Gospel activities.

Yes we are in a losing battle because until 2 years ago the Meetinghouse environment had not expanded to keep up with the BYOD world. It's not the members we are worried about and their personal uses of Meetinghouse Internet. We fight abuse from Peer2Peer traffic, proxy services that are utilized while people sit in the parking lot of the Church and use us as a wifi hotspot to look at adult content. Constant issues from neighboring buildings and complexes that don't want to pay for internet access so they jump on Church wireless and consume any available bandwidth for their own purposes.... It's a constant game of cat and mouse and we have to find and test way to keep services available to members and investigators while locking out the abusers.

I often notice when I look at my Android smart phone during Sunday meetings to check the time that it's busy downloading updates for various apps. I don't know why it chooses Sunday to do that instead of during the week on my home WiFi, nor do I know of any way to disable that "feature". It's beyond my control. But multiply that by a few hundred smart phone users, and I can see it why streaming content is unreliable! I hope the church can find a solution.

rsidwell wrote:I don't know why it chooses Sunday to do that instead of during the week on my home WiFi, nor do I know of any way to disable that "feature". It's beyond my control.

The setting is in the PlayStore. You can go into Settings and turn off auto-updates completely. Or you can go into the My Apps section and go into each app for a setting to disable auto-update for that app. I don't see any settings that allow you to control the schedule - only on/off/wifi only.

But yeah, it's not something I'd expect the general congregation to know. On the flip side, blocking that would block updates to the LDS apps. Not good either. I'm not seeing a good solution short of forcing members wanting to update at church to use their data plan. (Which probably still isn't a good plan.)

While saying that only 25% of the traffic is church sounds bad, I've got one building with a 20 Mbps connection. Between the stake, 3 wards with overlapping schedules, a branch and a FHC - I'm seeking peak usage of 11,172.852 Kbps. The connection doesn't appear to be saturating. But I have another building with a 3Mbps DSL - it's peak usage is 2,915.039 Kbps, and the chart actually shows "flat toping". They're saturating. The second building could use management. But the management is the biggest problem for the first building. IOW, no "one policy fits all" can work in all situations.

nelsonfam wrote:Youtube.com is still blocked however we are looking at enabling it and forcing the "Restricted Mode" view to limit the amount of questionable content being displayed. PSD has to ensure that videos are categorized correctly and viewable in Restricted mode but this is being explored right now. We want to enable youtube but not all the crap that comes with it.

Google is turning off the Safe Youtube for Schools feature which we were attempting to utilize as well but they are moving away from the "Personalized" service.

That is very good news to hear. I think we are MANY who appreciate to hear both why things are currently blocked but also appreciate to hear that work is going on to find a way to use a service like YouTube for the right content.

Most of my members are excellent at using their tablets to find church videos on church site to use in lessons but since they are hosted on YouTube it is hard for them to understand why they cannot be streamed. I have explained the technical reasons and also the solution of downloading to a stick and that is ok for many of us but certainly not everyone so finding a YouTube solution would be gratefully appreciated and most welcome.

Something else that might be useful would be for the church to perhaps ask the community their thoughts and ideas about upcoming changes so you can capture potential "downsides" and see if "workarounds" can be found.

Why is Youtube running now? when useful things like Spotify (for stake dances) and pinterest are censored?

By the way we do have a cisco firewall in this building

Sorry, my apologies. I didn´t read all of the above posts

If you can run youtube without the garbage then all the better.

But Spotify is actually a very useful app for stake dances and most activities, so if t could be time bared or blocked only on Sundays and say Monday, I would think that that would be a better option...

charly3358 wrote:Spotify (for stake dances)

The way I read it, that's against their Terms Of Service. A church dance is not "personal use".

Playing music at a public location like a church is considered commercial because it is a public location. You do not need to pay money at a location for it to be considered public/commercial.

Ok, I'll let them know that. I haven't read the terms. I suppose they will use pendrives with their own music.

Besides, I don't think it's a good idea to run a dance via a streaming service anyway. All it would take is someone passing around the latest video and it could affect the music.

charly3358 wrote:Ok, I'll let them know that. I haven't read the terms. I suppose they will use pendrives with their own music.

Which, BTW, is also questionable

I do not envy the church network team the chasing around of issues to make sure Meetinghouse Internet is used appropriately - But, I have argued before, and will continue to argue, to a certain extend having the Internet is like having running water, or heating and cooling in our meetinghouses. It enables life as we know it in these days and times. When I saw what was blocked the first thing that came to mind is that we all need a very large lesson in Millennial culture and youth/teen culture - or how they live their lives in today's world (the developed world anyway). We didn't block facebook but blocked snapchat and instagram - to ME this unduly punishes kids over adults.. by saying facebook is ok, we're basically saying well, the social media that adults use is OK in our meetinghouse, but the social media our kids use is not... yes, I'm generalizing a bit...

It's taking YEARS to develop a system of content distribution (with NO end in site at this point if the last Tech Conference is any indication) to reduce the pain of streaming in the meeting house, no amount of reducing services availabel inside the church will EVER result in good streaming in the meetinghouse until the streaming is localized inside the network, until it is LAN streaming. But we can decide to turn off services and unilaterally make that decision, without even informing those of us who, frankly, take the brunt of the complaints and have to figure out how to work around issues.

Fix the Content Distribution problem. Make the Media Library Services available inside our meetinghouses, and this discussion goes away....

johnshaw wrote:

charly3358 wrote:Ok, I'll let them know that. I haven't read the terms. I suppose they will use pendrives with their own music.

Which, BTW, is also questionable

That may be. It's more along the lines of what youth and singles have been doing for eons. But at least they aren't asking for a change to the network to do something that's easily shown as wrong.

russellhltn wrote:Besides, I don't think it's a good idea to run a dance via a streaming service anyway. All it would take is someone passing around the latest video and it could affect the music.

They only use audio, the free version of spotify only gives you audio.

charly3358 wrote:

russellhltn wrote:Besides, I don't think it's a good idea to run a dance via a streaming service anyway. All it would take is someone passing around the latest video and it could affect the music.

They only use audio, the free version of spotify only gives you audio.

I think you missed my point. If attendees do something to sap the bandwidth (such as showing a video on their phones), a streaming audio service could be affected.

While interesting and informative, this thread has quickly spun off topic.

If you'd like to continue discussing the viability of using Spotify or pandora or DRM downloaded files at church dances, or converse about the legality and terms of service for streaming platforms and the like, please create a new thread.

russellhltn wrote:

charly3358 wrote:

russellhltn wrote:Besides, I don't think it's a good idea to run a dance via a streaming service anyway. All it would take is someone passing around the latest video and it could affect the music.

They only use audio, the free version of spotify only gives you audio.

I think you missed my point. If attendees do something to sap the bandwidth (such as showing a video on their phones), a streaming audio service could be affected.

Yeah, I did miss the point probably read it too quickly.......

crolse wrote:While interesting and informative, this thread has quickly spun off topic.

If you'd like to continue discussing the viability of using Spotify or pandora or DRM downloaded files at church dances, or converse about the legality and terms of service for streaming platforms and the like, please create a new thread.

Aye aye, sir

Can someone from the Network team return on report on this item? I don't really see an affect on bandwidth on my firewall usage statistics over the last two weeks, and a couple have increased.
How about other STS, have you checked your firewalls to see if the affects your overall bandwidth usage?

johnshaw wrote:How about other STS, have you checked your firewalls to see if the affects your overall bandwidth usage?

A quick eyeball of the different buildings doesn't show any change - except in one building after an outage. I think I need to reset that modem.

johnshaw wrote:How about other STS, have you checked your firewalls to see if the affects your overall bandwidth usage?

We haven't had any noticeable changes in bandwidth usage.

Another negative impact of the new filtering policy that we just ran into with Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat blocked is that it makes it difficult to encourage members to share short clips/photos/etc. at our YSA activities (dances, the huge New Years Eve party we are about to have, etc.) on those social media channels without having to explain to them that they are blocked on the Church internet and that they need to use mobile data. Bandwidth isn't an issue at all in our building, so if those services are being blocked out of bandwidth concerns it would be nice to have an alternate filtering policy for higher bandwidth meetinghouses.

Another issue caused by blocking Twitter specifically is that at a lot of CES devotionals they ask members to share thoughts or questions on Twitter with #cesdevo, which then are sometimes read during the broadcast. If Twitter is blocked at general church meetinghouses, members watching from non-CES buildings (Seminaries/Institutes are on a different filtering policy) would not be able to participate using the meetinghouse internet, thus not being able to use the meetinghouse internet for a church purpose.

jamiep39 wrote:...Another issue caused by blocking Twitter specifically is that at a lot of CES devotionals they ask members to share thoughts or questions on Twitter with #cesdevo, which then are sometimes read during the broadcast. If Twitter is blocked at general church meetinghouses, members watching from non-CES buildings (Seminaries/Institutes are on a different filtering policy) would not be able to participate using the meetinghouse internet, thus not being able to use the meetinghouse internet for a church purpose.

I have noticed in our meetinghouse that many are just bypassing the wifi and using their own data plan to access those sites on their phones. Though it is nice to have the wifi available, I think this is the answer (if they are using phones with data available).

I think another big oversight is many of our buildings are used as operation centers during emergencies, and certain social media feeds, particularly Twitter, are invaluable during emergencies for keeping informed of official information. Of course, for emergencies the firewall can be bypassed, but the person(s) with the access and know-how might not always be available.

Mikerowaved wrote:I think another big oversight is many of our buildings are used as operation centers during emergencies, and certain social media feeds, particularly Twitter, are invaluable during emergencies for keeping informed of official information. Of course, for emergencies the firewall can be bypassed, but the person(s) with the access and know-how might not always be available.

Unless the provided modem is also a router, I don't know as you can bypass the firewall - replace it with another maybe. But doing that may disable all the church WAPs. In that situation, I'd suggest calling CHQ and having he settings changed. They might be able to do that on a emergency basis.

The simple truth around all these comments is that wards and stakes are utilizing internet services in creative ways. As they've been instructed by those we sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators. If any given Sunday those services may not be available they will stop being used. This sends very different messages and makes people think the church has fiefdoms at odds with each other, one hand not knowing what the other is doing, etc...

What nobody has mentioned is that this really only impacts the poor, and frugal. Everyone else can just switch to their data plans.

The building, and internet, are used by many people every day of the week and the new DNS filtering policy is impacting them. For example, a seminary class has used https://getkahoot.com/ as a way to keep students interested and the lesson fun. However, it appears this site is being filtered. How do get an exception for this application?

It's been a while since it was announced, but the Assistant Clerk, Stake Technology Specialist has the assignment to take these requests and relay them to the church. I searched back and found a notification from a year ago about changes to the DNS filtering.

Here was that message in TXT, and explains how to get the change made, if it will be allowed.

Meetinghouse Internet Change
The Internet filtering service for meetinghouses in your stake will change next week between February 10 and February 14, 2014. This change applies to all of your meetinghouses with Cisco 800 series Meetinghouse Firewalls.

The main difference will be the page displayed when attempting to access a restricted site, which will now look like this:
Inappropriate content will continue to be blocked. YouTube will also continue to be blocked. Official Church videos are available at LDS.org, mormon.org, mormonchannel.com, and the Gospel Library mobile applications.

To request access to a blocked site, click the Report an Inaccuracy button.

Please communicate this change to your stake president. Encourage him to inform other leaders in the stake.
If you have problems or questions related to Meetinghouse Internet, please contact the Global Service Center.
Meetinghouse technology feedback may be sent to mht@ldschurch.org.

-The Meetinghouse Technology Coordination Team

@marvinc. getkahoot.com and kahoot.it were requested to be allowed in late November and are currently in the LDS Meetinghouse whitelist. If you have having issues, PM with specific details.

nelsonfam wrote:No scheduled meetings right now but I would hope after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Has any additional discussion happened on this topic from the CHQ side? I feel like a lot of members in our stake have stopped using the building internet entirely and resorted to mobile data even for church-related purposes because of some of the frequently used services that are blocked. It's also made several social media sharing opportunities awkward when we had to tell the members that they couldn't use the Church-provided internet to share their Church-related thoughts and experiences. I also don't know what to say to people who ask me why Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat are blocked while Facebook is not. (Not that I think Facebook should be blocked. Please don't do that.) It's especially confusing that Twitter is blocked even though so many official Church events make heavy use of it (CES devotionals, General Conference, etc.) It sends mixed messages that we're saying "use these inspired tools" (Bednar) but also saying "you can't use these inspired tools at the church".

The ideal situation in my opinion from a member usability and usefulness perspective would be to revert the filtering policy to the previous policy before all of these changes were made. I can understand reserving bandwidth for church purposes on Sunday, but I feel like the cost of services lost and member confusion outweighs the benefits. This is especially true in our YSA building. We haven't seen any noticeable bandwidth changes since the new policy has been in place.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Any meetinghouse internet service that is paid for by the FM is likely restricted to "basic" speed to minimize monthly budget expenditures. In a perfect world, the FM would pay for all internet service. However, companies that provide DSL bundled services, such as Windstream, often refuse to send separate bills to the FM and the stake. In my stake, DSL services paid for by the stake may be increased to higher speeds, while internet services paid for by the FM are limited to basic speeds.
Our stake has 8 meetinghouses. Two have cablemodems, five have DSL, and one has a wireless connection to the ISP's tower. Although the two cablemodems can easily provide 50MB or 100MB service, the FM pays for the cheapest available service from Cox, which I believe is 5MB. When I was the stake clerk, I was able to increase the DSL service from 1MB to 6MB at one meetinghouse because the stake paid that bill.
One meetinghouse in my stake is shared by three wards. The 1MB DSL service in that building is always maxed out on Sundays. When people complain, we just tell them that the internet service exists for the administrative computers, and they are not supposed to be streaming videos for their lessons and such.

jamiep39,

I'm not sure what you mean by discussion. Discussion didn't happen prior to the change. A sample of STS were not gathered into a conference call for input. Stake Presidents were not asked about the problems they are encountering or asked to take a survey. This was purely analysis by the meetinghouse networking and interested other teams at CHQ and the decision made and implemented. There still hasn't even been a communication to the STS/Stake Clerk/Bishops and Stake Presidents of the changes and why.

I expressed previously in the thread about why some social media platforms and not others like facebook. Why block Spotify but not Amazon, why pinterest and not facebook? We'll never know.

In my stake, our FM group pays for all the Internet connection. We have ComCast in 5 of our buildings, Metrocast in 1 and FIOS in the stake center. As far as I know our FM group is paying for the low end, but at the same time, they will do what is necessary to make sure that there is good bandwidth available. For instance, I ordered the FIOS at the stake center at 15 megs down and 5 up. Eventually our FM manager upped it to 25/25 because of the potential for a lot of missionaries being on at the same time. There is no plans to upgrade it any further. So I like my FM manager. He does what is necessary, but doesn't over pay.

johnshaw wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by discussion.

I was referring to @nelsonfam's earlier mention of internal follow up meetings and architectural discussions. My post was mostly targeted at @nelsonfam or others on the inside who might know more about the status.

I was able to get access to the admin portal of our filtering policy and made some adjustments to the categories and blacklists. You should see web and mobile access to social media platforms improve over the next 24 hours.

Of the six named, the Church has an extensive presence on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Elder Bednar has encouraged member use of those sites for missionary activities, I use Twitter a lot to send things out and last week I sent the 2015 Youth Theme song 'Embark' into a discussion of Grammy nominees and winners, and got four downloads out of it as I had provided the link for that as found on the Church site. With Twitter, you can tweet out things during General Conference live (called 'live-tweeting), remember how popular #LDSConf is?

Yes Spotify and Pandora may have TOS clauses regarding large gatherings, but Pandora does have a business setup that handles that sort of thing, but both also air commercials unless the account is paid for rather than a 'freemium' account (a term used in the industry to describe a lot of these types of sites that offer both free and paid services).

Snapchat has a lot of problems yet, it's gaining respectability, but the worst problems are not cleared away, such as pornography, and some other issues.

I think the Church may have selected a very cheap filtering setup, more robust filtering solutions can allow for time of day and even day of week filtering of certain sites, not just block/allow exception lists. Having that feature in a filtering product (Blue Coat has done this since the filter was Cerberian), and that would allow for blocking a lot of stuff on Sundays that would normally be OK on another day of the week in the same location.

russellhltn wrote:
Spotify specifically we use for YSA dances and to provide background music for activities, etc.

Its my understanding that Spotify is licensed much as a rented DVD, in that it's for personal use only. Isn't playing streaming content like that at a church dance a serious Intellectual Property issue? Legitimate DJ's pay for the privilege of entertaining with someone else's creative property, shouldn't the church as well? We know we can't steal the public performance rights of movie makers by having ward movie nights to play the latest Disney release, how do we justify it with music for dances?

dmadderra wrote:

russellhltn wrote:
Spotify specifically we use for YSA dances and to provide background music for activities, etc.

Its my understanding that Spotify is licensed much as a rented DVD, in that it's for personal use only. Isn't playing streaming content like that at a church dance a serious Intellectual Property issue? Legitimate DJ's pay for the privilege of entertaining with someone else's creative property, shouldn't the church as well? We know we can't steal the public performance rights of movie makers by having ward movie nights to play the latest Disney release, how do we justify it with music for dances?

Yes, that is correct. Though many ignore or don't think about the problem of showing movies, either, or copying music for choir. If it happens in your ward or stake, make sure your voice is heard.

Because the copyright issue is a separate topic, it should probably be moved to its own thread. I've done some research trying to resolve the matter and the best solution seems to be purchasing a license through Christian Copyright Solutions. From what I've read this would grant the Church (at least in the United States) permission to play any song from the BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC catalogs. From what I can tell that's nearly any song one would want to play. Based on their licensing structure it would cost the entire church $2100 per year and all of the units in the US would be covered. (https://www.christiancopyrightsolutions ... ic-pricing) We've considered purchasing the 500-1999 option that covers our average attendance but haven't done it yet. Does anyone know if the Church has looked into any licensing solutions like this? I feel like this would be a good route to go.

bradhokanson wrote:@marvinc. getkahoot.com and kahoot.it were requested to be allowed in late November and are currently in the LDS Meetinghouse whitelist. If you have having issues, PM with specific details.

I noticed that Kahoot is now listed as a site to be blocked in meetinghouses. I was planning on using Kahoot at the end of the month and now I’m scrambling. Do you know if there’s a way to request a review on this game? Or do you know a reasonable (free) substitute that allows more than just a few participants?