Google Images

[MasterRacker]

We have a SonicWall firewall appliance that blocks known gaming/porn/etc. sites and does a decent job. We've just discovered what appears to be a gaping hole however.

I can browse to Google Images and search on things that bring up porn and low and behold, I have a screen full of explicit thumbnails. The appliance does it's job preventing me from going to any of the sites, but the thumbnails are right there (and now in my cache).

I assume this happens because Google is caching the thumbnail images on it's own servers. If this is true, there is no way I can think of to block this. Is there a way? Our network engineer says he gets the same results on Yahoo or MSN as well. If these sites are caching on their own servers, can any kind of blocking work?

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[LawnBoy]

The draconian solution would be to block images.google.com.

Yes, caching is a serious problem. You can also view websites from Google's caches.

 

[sleipnir214]

Does your content filter support the permanent enforcement of Google's "SafeSearch Filtering" option?

My LightSpeed content filter has an option where whenever a query is sent to Google, it edits the URL passed to Google, adding "&safe=active" to the URL string. This has the effect of always turning on SafeSearch, making it harder to access inappropriate material. It does a similar thing with the Yahoo search engine.


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[LawnBoy]

Didn't have much time yesterday, sorry.

Caching is a problem that is going to be very difficult to solve with technology. We have implemented policies (the human kind) instead.

While it is a violation to view forbidden content, we forgive unintentional violations. If a user should happen across a porn image (or racial cartoon, or hate speech, etc, etc) they have been instructed to inform the IT department when it happens. We then log the incident.

If during some future audit the contraband is discovered in the user's cache, we have an explanation for it. If there is no log entry the user can be subject to disciplinary action.

 

[JackSkellington]

Unfortunately policy does not protect institutions such as schools who could be held accountable for minors accessing inappropriate material