A Little Monkey and Tails.

I had this cute munchkin visit me yesterday for a bit. Her father (my nephew) was passing through.  He and his wife have a set up where he takes this little one to visit his friends from around where he grew up (they have children also) for the week-end, and her older son (from another relationship) goes to his father's grandparent's for the week-end - resulting in the Mom getting 2 days all to herself. They call it a mental health day (or something similar). I think that is wonderful! Although I am not positive when my nephew gets any totally alone time.

She is the cutest little 3 year old and she climbed the neighbor's swing set/fort like a little monkey.

I am going to try harder to post more often. I have so many things I can do on-line that almost all of my time is spent sitting here at the computer. Almost everything I do can help me in my job in one way or the other. Helping people is still one of the biggest areas in my life for me. Online, I am a reader of redd!t and have several divisions that I read to see if I can help. I also get several ideas and tips from readers to benefit myself.

Just last evening I was reading the area about Tor (The Onion Router). This one has been an example I use when I am instructing the techs about the filter. Most of them have no idea what it is, or how it works. Sigh. But that is an entire book in itself and if you know me, you are probably aware that I can get very long winded when I start talking tech.

Anyway, the user mentioned Tails.  I had not heard or read about this one. So, I had to investigate and of course I had to have it. For testing purposes and to present to the techs how end  users (the savvy ones) are getting around the filter in the schools and endangering their network.

I had to find 2 USB sticks with 4 GB available. (I had always referred to them as flash drives, but I kind of like this term). So I did have one empty 4 GB one (how did THAT happen?), and the other had just back up data on it - so I moved that to one of my external HDDs.

So, I started this new endeavor.  Four hours later I went to bed. LOL!  I am learning a lot, but I am also being very, very cautious. I have screwed up my system before trying this stuff and I should have known not to start this after 9 p.m. I was much too tired to think this through and follow long, intricate instructions.

It is one of those deals where you are going through the steps one at at time, and you come across the step that reads "If you don't have such and such, click here to set that up (or install it). So, you follow that link and you start installing that program. You get halfway through the steps and you come across another one that reads "If you have never installed such and such before, you need to change this or that before you can enable it". And I follow the link to THAT site. It went about 4 sites deep and I was getting very tired.

Well, it didn't work my first go round. But hey, I did learn a lot. And, I will try again today. Maybe. Of course I will - I am too excited to get this puppy on a flash drive and see what I can do with it in my work environment so I can bring it to their attention to watch out for this work around.

I run into the techs who have the attitude "So, what? They are always going to find a way around the filter. I can't stop them all."  This might be true, but I can see that he/she has given up the fight. This saddens me. Yes, there will always be a rogue student who knows so much about technology that he will consider this a challenge (sometimes they don't mean harm, they just want the ego boost that they were able to beat the system) and brag to his friends and share his knowledge.

But once in a while, guys......once in a blue moon - I get a tech who gets that look in his eye, the "Oh really?" look and they write this down. They hopefully are going to take action to block or attempt to block this activity in his or her district.

And that is why I do it. That is why I share what I know with others. I want to make the schools safer for the students. It may be a losing battle, but I can't just say "Screw it. Let 'em see it. They're gonna see it anyway."  Well, I'd prefer them NOT to see it in an educational environment. In other words "Not on MY watch."

Did anybody watch the movie "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"  You know how I love my movies and I have so many I can talk about. I like Tina Fey in MOST of her movies. I am not a HUGE fan, but at least she does not make me cringe. For this movie, they delicately add humor to a horrifying situation that so many live through. But then there was MASH. I know the humor was exaggerated, and there were only a few times when the show brought us back to the reality of the horror of war.

It is slowly coming back to me. I had trouble remembering my password today. I had trouble finding spell check. But it is coming back. I need to go and ready all of YOUR posts this past year (or has it been longer) to see what is going on with you.

I have a lot more to write (tell). This year seemed to be a bad one for cancer hitting my friends. They are fighting the fight. A lot of little children in my family. I always like that. I was the youngest of 8, and I was 12 years old before any of my siblings had a baby. They then came thick and fast, but that first grandchild (for my Mom) and first nephew (for me) was doted on. My sister was the type who packed up her husband and baby and drove 50 miles one way EVERY week-end to stay with us (at my Mom's house). And on Sunday evenings drive 50 miles back.  Well, her husband drove. Her husband did everything for her. Nice in some ways, but over the years (as she has told us) it can be very smothering. We used to chide my sister when the gas stations changed over to self-serve. She had ALL the gas stations marked out who would pump the gas for you. It was ages before she was able to pump her own gas. I'm not sure she can, even now. Hmmmmm..... LOL!

Ah....where have I been?  I guess I needed a break. I am currently updating a Newsletter for work and I needed to test a blog site. So naturally, I chose this one. I need to show the techs in the districts how easy it is for a student to see inappropriate pictures when a blog site (such as blogger.com) is open.

Okay...I've seen enough.  I changed my interests to some unpleasant subjects, then went to other bloggers with the same (unpleasant) interests. About lost my lunch.

So, as an example let us say that blogger.com is allowed (open) in a school district. The reason is a lot of educators (teachers and such) create a blog on the site they are familiar with (such as our - blogger.com). They ask the tech to allow the site - let's call it Mr. Williams Science Class. On blogger.com it may be called: mrwilliams.blogger.com.  The filter recognizes the root in the URL. In this case, "blogger.com" It won't only allow mrwilliams.blogger.com, it must allow the entire site. I have tested this like crazy hoping I can just get Mr. Williams' blog site. These are examples, by the way.

Nope. Filter must allow the entire blogger.com site. Well, given a savvy student, once they realize that they can get to blogger.com, they can create a blog in about 15 minutes and place interests in their profile with subjects describing any sexual/fetish term you can think of - and begin finding others with the same interests who have posted pictures that you would never have believed existed 15 years ago.

To make it even worse, the tech has no idea how this works. Most of them don't. Not only do they allow blogger.com, but they allow the entire category. In our filter it is called blogger.forums.

That allows all blog sites (that the filter has categorized as such).  Wordpress.com.

There we go. Seven minutes. It took me 7 minutes to create a new blog site in wordpress.com, verify the site with one of my many fake e-mails and search for nude photos on the blog site. I was looking at nasties in no time.

The above wordpress.com is categorized in the forums.blogs category. So many districts have this open. I try to get the word out in my Newsletter. At my trainings, I discover that nobody reads my Newsletters.

What should I use? Shock and awe?  Should I have the host of the training sit there in front of everybody, create their own blog page on wordpress, type in nude under interests and let them all see for themselves?  Would I get in trouble for demonstrating this in a school? Sigh.

I have a training coming up next week. Nobody has signed up yet. They do not have time they say. I had three show at the last one. One tech was brand new, one tech will never get it (as in he will never understand how the filter works) and another was rather savvy, but I shocked him with what I showed them.

So, there you have it. Will Little Johnny see anything? - maybe not. High School Johnny - you betcha.

I want to be like Dear Abby

So, when I read my latest suspicious search report, I want to be like Dear Abby. Most end users are searching for unsavory subject matter, but once in a while you just get questions.

Such as "Where is the nearest Dick's Sporting Goods?"  This shows in my report because the word "dick" is included in the subject matter. If somebody searched for "Where is the nearest Target?" I won't see that request.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, you get the occasional question that makes me go "hmmmm". One that comes to mind is "Will make-up kill a turtle?"   I went "Yikes".

Hopefully that story had a happy ending.

But imagine if I were like Dear Abby. You can call me "Dr. Answering Suspicious Searches"  or Dr. ASS for short.

One question popped out at me the other day.  I can't help but pretend I am like Dear Abby and my mind just answers them as she would.

Dear Dr. ASS:  "Will having sex push back my period?"

Answer:  "Sure, probably by about nine months!"

(Same end user because it was the same IP address, but about twenty minutes later)

Dear Dr. ASS:  "Can I eat baked beans while I am pregnant?"

Answer:  "Sure, but I wouldn't recommend it."

Things like that. I have become desensitized to the other searches. I see so many. You can imagine a young teenagers' mind and curiosity and what shows up in the "suspicious" search query. Sigh. Just to give you an example, they probably do not know what bestiality is yet, but hey - they search for and I imagine hope to find graphic images. I am certainly hoping that the filter is holding strong and just because they try to search for the subject matter, does not mean they see or get any web pages that hold that horrific content.

The horrible thing is, to test the filter one kind of has to search for things like this themselves. Let me tell you it isn't as easy as you might think. For starters, being raised to be a "good girl" and going to Sunday School and mean looks from my Mom if I mentioned even the word "period" let alone anything stronger. You seriously got the look of death from her. Suffice it to say, I did not learn the facts of life from her.

It just is not that easy for me to type in "gir1 having s3x with a h0rse" into the search engine. I mean, My God! What if an image were to slip through?!  You just can't erase that kind of picture from your mind. And, GROSS!  I can only imagine because I have not (nor probably ever will) search for anything of that nature. This is all just information to let you know what I see in the searches. Yuck!

I have searched images and we have an issue with Bing images that will not force the "safe search" feature like Google does.  With the filter on, if an end users tries long and hard enough, pretty soon they will be rewarded with images that just floor my adult 54-year old mind.

If it makes you feel any better, I have set the filter up to block ALL Bing images that are on their explicit.bing.com server. That is "supposedly" where all the icky stuff resides. If you want to test this, go to bing.com, click on Images and type in any unsavory word or phrase that you can think of.  If your bing is like mine, the search setting defaults to Medium. Changing this setting to "Strict" cuts out the most obscene images out of the search. Maybe Bing got their act together, but for some reason, end users were able to override this setting and choose the setting "off".  This is disastrous. This is why we blocked bing images altogether.

Now, do the same in Google. Even before changing any settings the results are less nasty. At least mine were. The only setting that Google has now (they must have changed it) is to choose "Filter Explicit Results" and when you do that, depending on what subject matter you searched for you may get nothing. That is what happened to me. I typed the upper female body part in Google and got quite an eye full. When I changed the setting to "Filter Explicit Results" Google told me it could not find any images for my request. YAY!

Discreet

I may have mentioned a week or so ago about some techs having issue with a new feature our organization's filter has. It is a reporting feature. A school tech can run several reports to see what is going on in their network. At a school district you want to stay on top of things.

Here is my dilemma. I have to learn about the report features so that I can tell our techs that they have this, this and that available to them. So  I run plenty of reports to see what they are.

In doing so, there is one school district, the end user is logged in as an Administrator and several hundred hits are searches for p0rn.

Now, this is where I have to be discreet. The first thing I did was to run a report on just that end user for the past seven days and hand it over to my superior.

Remember - this could be an Admin user who is not logging off of their machine and a student is doing all the searching. Or, the student may have stolen the login credentials. The searches are very young-ish school age searches. The age of the girls searched for etc.

Now, what will be interesting to me is to see what my superiors instruct me to do. Of course, I am not the person to do anything as far as the school goes, but do they want me to continue to turn over this type of report or am I to turn a blind eye?

I mean - nobody was doing this for the dozen or so years before we purchased this feature. This feature was not purchased to do this. It was purchased to make the lives of our district techs easier. The tech should be the one pulling this type of report but this is all new - we are still in a testing phase.

Every end users signed an Acceptable use policy.

Here is my view. If the admin is viewing p0rn during school hours on a school owned computer - they need to stop and possibly be reprimanded. If a student is using the computer under the Admin's login - that needs to stop. Either way - to me - it needs to be addressed.

What I will really hate (and this is what I expect) is that it will be totally ignored. As if I did  not even send the message. Time will tell.

Rambling on

I have bits and pieces to post about today. Above is a photo of a vehicle of some sort I was following a month or so ago. It is stopped - see the tail lights. We were sitting in construction traffic.

The new study on marijuana smoking. Or is it new?  I always used to say "They should just legalize marijuana."  I don't smoke it. I figured it was not much worse than alcohol. Maybe better. Now that I am in my 50's I see older people who have smoked for great lengths of time and it ain't so pretty. I now personally believe the smoking has had a negative impact on their lives.

I was in a meeting on Monday. I had taken a survey of what various educational organizations around the state of Ohio used for filtering their school districts' networks. A tech was rambling on in his negative view of the product our educational organization uses. He is always negative. I feel he has a personal vendetta against me, but I could be right. (!)  He blabbed out that only 2 organizations in the state uses such and such. I corrected him and said 12 did. There are a total of 23 educational organizations in the state of Ohio.

He stopped and asked me "12?"  I nodded and confirmed "12." I had sent out e-mails asking the directors of the organizations what they used and 22 out of 23 places had responded to me.

And, the others in the meeting would have believed him had I not been there. He did not take a survey. He was just spouting off negative blabber.

This is only one incident. This guy "grandstands" at almost every meeting. What do you do with somebody like that? He is poison. He has a "posse" of other guy techs that gravitate around him. Four at least. I say they "drink the kool-aid" that he is dishing out. The sad part (for me) is the other 4 techs - two at least - are very good in their own right. They are strong techs that work well with me at other times. I guess they just gravitate to him. I may not ever understand why. Maybe if they sit next to him, he will do all the talking and they won't have to.

When he does have a network problem, I approach each incident as fresh and new. I do not keep the negativity on my back when I deal with him. I am polite to him and cordial. He gets the same attentive response I give every other tech that asks for my help. I make sure of that. I won't sink to his level or let him get me down.

But, each new incident where he thrashes my work or my organization's work knocks me back a bit. Some of the female techs are beginning to ask me "What is his problem?" 

Sigh. He is just one of those experiences in life, I guess. The human psyche. Unbelievable.

Where did she go?

There once was a lady who wrapped gifts like this. Where did she go?

Some big discussions in technology in educ@tion today. BY0T (Bring your 0wn technology). Symbols placed on purpose to thwart search engines. Do you have children/grandchildren in sch00l? Almost every child over the age of fourteen (perhaps younger) has a cellular phone. Most have a "smart" phone.

It is true that the sch00l network can block them from access, but most have G3/G4 for connecting. What do you do then? Most of us know that we do not need wireless to gain access to e-mail with our phones. How do tea@chers handle this in the cl@ssr00m? It is kind of a mixed bag right now. You have some who sit back and say "I don't worry about it. They signed an AUP (acceptable user p0licy)."  Does that really cover it, though? Others are fraught with worry. Some are creating an entirely new AUP just to cover the new technology.

Then there are devices such as my n00k. It is small enough (even with the case) to fit in my purse. Most of the schools are issuing netb00ks to $tudents to use. Much cheaper than iPads.

And why does my manager keep posting his "cel phone" number when he is out of the office? It is not a celluloid device. It is a cellular device! Cel is a short name for celluloid. Sigh. Oh, dear. I think I am getting cranky. Time to find my pillow.

Wait! I watched War Horse. Very good. My daughter watched it with me, she said the book went into much more detail and emotions that were not captured in the film.  Did you like the book/movie Black Beauty? The book War Horse is told from the point of view of the horse. (Not certain the entire book is, though). I liked the movie. I did not need tissues.

Educated Idiots

This article speaks for itself. You can have an education, but you can still be an idiot.

Movies:

50/50 - I really liked this one. Except for Rogen. I do not like Rogen. In anything. Oh, crap. I have to take that back. He did the voice of Paul. I liked Paul. Grrrr.

Glass, light and speed

So many of my schools are in a rural setting. They do not get cable television let alone fiber to their buildings. The state tried to establish a way to give them what the big (money-rich) schools could get. Somebody, somewhere believes that each child should get an equal education and opportunity.

We all know that is hogwash. If a child goes to a big school in the city, they are amazed at how little the rural school has to offer. And now it is more of an issue than ever. Funding cuts.

When it comes down to fixing the roof of the building or repairing the buses that transport the children, there is no money left over for renovating the building to accommodate fiber optics. Buildings built in 1908 do not have the electrical structure we need today to run all the electronics.

The students sit and wait while the teacher struggles to get their technology working. What worked fine for her class yesterday the teacher cannot get to work today. Without the projector or the video unit the class cannot get the benefit of the lesson plan.

Epic fail.

And before you go and say "Go back to the way we did it with books and paper and pencils" - please remember it is the school staff's duty to prepare our children to survive in "today's" world. They will be faced with scads of electronic devices and social networking and shared devices. They will not be reading a book or writing on a piece of paper with a pencil (unless they want to). They are going to need to know how to get a task done and at lightning speed.

The above photo is fused silica the inner core of fiber optics. Glass is technology's best friend. Advil is mine.