S4DART20090210

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Protecting minors within the Greek School Network
from exposure to inappropriate contentwww.sch.gr/
safe
Athanasios Douitsis Network Operations
Center National Technical University of Athens
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Overview

• Problem statement
• About the Greek School Network
• What is being done
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Initial Goal Introduction of network services to
  Schools.
• Todays Goal Establishment of a safe environment
• Discouragement or interdiction of access to
  harmful content
• Avoidance of censorship
• Avoidance of extremely harsh restrictions
• Objective
• Limit access to inappropriate content
• Allow communication, learning, cooperation

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Introduction

• Basic Principles (for minor students)
• Right to freely develop ones own personality.
• Obligation of schools and families to protect
  minors from exposure to harmful content.
• Reflection of Internet society and Real society.
• Increasing Ubiquity of the Internet in the
  future.
• Treatment of the Internet as a gift, not a danger
  !
• Significance of cooperation between

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Special Characteristics

• Publishing of text, pictures, music, video by
  anyone
• No centralized content authority with regard to
  original material
• No known automatic generalized content detection
  / classification mechanism
• Unheard of access to unprecedented volumes of
  data by minors
• Exposure to and communication with a
  significantly larger audience
• Country boundaries not applicable.

Result Concern within society and especially
among parents
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Potentially harmful content (for minors)?

• Web sites and applications containing
• Pornography (esp. child)?
• Gambling
• Messages promoting
• Alcohol and drug usage
• Racism
• Violence, hate, aggressive behaviors
• Gun usage
• Advertisements
• Information / instructions on hacking for illegal
  purposes

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Sources of inappropriate content

• web
• Commercial or personal pages
• Communication services
• Chat, FTP, Newsgroups and Bulletin boards
• Instant Messaging (ICQ, MSN, Skype, ??p)?
• E-mail (spam mail, viruses)?
• Social Networking sites (MySpace, Hi5, Facebook,
  etc)?
• E-Commerce
• E-Commerce services
• E-Advertisement

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Overview

• Problem Statement
• About the Greek School Network
• What is being done
• Conclusion

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What is the Greek School Network

• Main Objectives
• Creation and operation of network infrastructure
• Connection of all the Schools to the Internet
• Development, provision and support of network
  services
• Computer Support of users
• Educational Goals
• Support of the learning process by utilization of
  network services
• Pedagogical Innovation through the usage of new
  technologies
• Access to certified digital content
• Geographically dispersed team cooperation
• Cooperation with other national institutions
• Administrative purposes

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EduNet Basic Facts

• Largest public network (span and user count)?
• 14.390 schools, 7.500 school LANs, 2.811
  administrative units, 494 school libraries, 71
  public libraries ?a? 29 municipal libraries, 60
  state archives.
• Network access to 67.942 education workers
  (teachers, professors) and 14.019 students
• Intranet characteristics
• Added value services, specially targeted for
  educational purposes
• Open Source development contributions to the
  community
• Training and support of users.
• Network infrastructure complementary to GRNet.
• Broadband access to improve services and reduce
  operating costs.

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Backbone

• Backbone network GRNet
• Minimization of operation cost
• Access 51 PoPs
• 10 Gigabit connections with GRNet

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Network Architecture
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User Categories

• User authentication paramount for safety and
  accountability
• Schools
• Administrative Units
• Teachers and other educational workers
• Students
• Administrative Personnel

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Provided Services

• Basic Services net access, access to www
  (moderated), web portal, student and teacher
  registration.
• Communication Services Email w/ virus scanner
  spam filter, mailing lists, bulettin boards, IM,
  Teleconference.
• Web Hosting www page hosting (teachers,
  students), page creation wizards, PHP, DB access.
• Advanced Services Video on Demand, Live
  Streaming, Teleteaching, Class management,
  Educational Software.
• Complementary Services E-Emphasis e-zine, other
  publications, virtual drives
• Infrastructure Geographically Distributed
  Helpdesk, LDAP, School GIS, DNS, Statistics
• Administration Services User management,
  Network monitoring and management, CERT
  (security), remote management of school routers

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Overview

• Problem Statement
• About the Greek School Network
• What is being done
• Conclusion

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Policy Framework

• Definition of Accepted Usage
• Development and usage of filters, disallowing
  access to www content
• Pornography
• Gambling
• Drugs, alcohol
• Violence, aggressive behavior, racism
• Continuous briefing and awareness
  (www.sch.gr/safe) of the community (teachers,
  students, parents)?
• Creation of interestinge educational material
• Cooperation with safety organizations (DART,
  Safeline, SaferInternet)?
• Cooperation with law enforcement

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Content Filtering Techniques

• Blocking keywords
• Specific words
• But Cannot check videos, images etc.
• Negative Positive Lists
• Predefined acceptable or unacceptable lists
• But Burdensome maintenance of lists
• Content labeling rating
• www page tagging
• tagging by the author
• tagging by independent organizations
• Combination of the above

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Filter Implementation

• Transparent Proxy.
• Squid software
• Used also by JANET , GARR, DFN, SWITCH, SURFnet,
  NLANR.
• Multiple multi-level rules (user, user groups)
• Access blockage, warning for attempt to enter an
  inappropriate area.
• Limitations for specific hours of the day.
• Traffic accounting, report generation
• Blacklist creation with the help of volunteer
  communities
• Communication between Users and Administrators.

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Blacklist description

• www blacklist created and maintained by the
  creators of SquidGuard
• 3 types of record
• domains, e.g. sex.com, blocking of entire web
  sites (1.102.600 records)?
• urls, e.g. bearportal.com/adults, blocking of
  specific urls (200.815 records)?
• expressions, e.g. sex, descripton of keywords
• Significant flexibility

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Overview

• Problem Statement
• About the Greek School Network
• What is being done
• Conclusion

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Final Result
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Statistics
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Role of Parents

• Need for education and awareness
• Need for family level mandate for acceptable
  internet usage
• Escorting of minors during initial internet usage
• Indicate/propose appropriate web content for
  minors
• Teaching of minors never to disclose personal
  info
• Placement of computers in a well supervised point
  in the house.
• Learn about content filtering tools available.

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Conclusions

• Content filtering appropriate for School
  environments (not adults).
• Treatment of the Internet as public wealth.
• Acknowledgement of the complexity of the problem
  at hand.
• Cooperation required between State, Industry,
  Academia, Users, Organizations.
• Uniformity of best practices throughout the
  world.
• Nonequivalence between filtering and 100
  success.
• Awareness and education of school staff and
  parents.
• Development of noteworthy educational material.
• ISPs self-regulation.

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Thank you very much!!

• See also http//www.sch.gr http//www.sch.gr/s
  afe http//blogs.sch.gr/internet_safety
  http//www.cert.sch.gr
• Contact us at info _at_ sch.gr

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