Subject: Re: URLs with tildes blocked by firewall

From: Lachlan Cranswick <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 1997 14:45:38 +1000

After presenting an internet Workshop at last year's Denver X-ray
conference I heard quite a few interesting stories from the 
audience - most of which seemed to mainly originate from US
corporations(?).

Company names deleted, these include:

A company insisting that each exact URL you wanted to be specified in
advance so they could set the permissions that you could receive
these (and only these) URLs.

The best one I heard was a company that had "hidden" content 
filters to check the content and make sure not of it was 
inappropriate.   To check for pornographic material, they 
would do checks on the string "X-rated".  However, their system 
would only use the first 4 characters - "X-ra".   One of the company
powder diffractionists got hauled over the coals for browsing
pornographic material.  It seems he did a web search for "X-rays"

I also know of some companies that will not let their ordinary 
staff browse on the real World Wide Web.  They have to request the
site they are interested in browsing through - and these
are then downloaded by the IT department onto local network hard-disks
for off-line browsing.

I'm sure there must be more stories like this out there?

---

Quite a few useful sites have the ~ symbol in them - as they are
individual homepages.  Why not try Stefan Webers Crystallography
and Quasicrystal homepage (with much good free DOS and Java software):
    http://www.nirim.go.jp/~weber/

Cheers,

Lachlan.

>  I have a query for the Chemistry-Internet community at-large, but
>particularly for industrial sites.  Our corporate IT department recently
>completed the installation of a firewall/proxy for all Internet traffic
>and one of the "protections" they have implemented is a filtering
>process that prohibits access to certain URLs (sites) - some explicitly
>and others by somewhat generic rules.  One such generic rule is the the
>presence of a tilde (~) in the URL.   Tilde's are often used as a
>shortcut representation of a home directory (particularly on Unix
>systems).  For some reason our IT department considers such sites as
>inappropriate for business/research purposes. It now take VP approval to
>unblock such sites.  Has anyone else heard of, experienced, or fully
>understand such a policy?
>
>  [This message was multi-posted, please pardon any duplication]
>
>
>
>- Jack
>
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Lachlan Cranswick  - Melbourne, Australia                    _--_|\  
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