FC: More on web rules and schools -- from a Swiss perspective

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Previous message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02174.html
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From: "Claude Almansi" <calmansi () hotmail com>
To: declan () well com, john () elfrank org
Cc: endlessquestions () home com
Subject: Re: FC: NYC schools reportedly adopt restrictive web linking, use 
rules
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 10:07:48 +0200

Mr Elfrank, when I read your description I was struck by the similarity 
with what happens here in Switzerland, or at least in Canton Ticino (we 
have 25 different educational systems, so I cannot tell what happens 
elsewhere).

As William J. Hart (on the Cc line)said in an e-mail he sent you*, Mr 
McCullagh, we are submitted to the same kind of censorship of interaction 
here. It is only cruder: our sysops block ports, so that we cannot have 
direct messenging or paging or... He did indeed teach me everything about 
the internet from scratch - I had asked what "ISP" meant in a discussion at 
one of his education communities - per e-mail, as no direct interaction was 
possible. No one in the school hierarchy dared question them (they cover 
the whole cantonal administration, and are protected by the very powerful 
"consigliere di stato" (local minister) for economy, Marina Masoni. I did 
wrench from them the numbers of some of the blocked ports by asking naive 
questions in e-mails to the sysops, with Cc to all the people in charge of 
education and ICT in education: 5190 TCP and  1024 a 65535 . In the same 
answer, Mr Engeli stated that "everything accessible through browsers lik! 
e Explorer and Netscape, i.e. through TCP Port 80" was available to us. 
Which was patently untrue as IE MEssenger requires one of these ports. I 
got no answer when I asked him about it. Besides, in school libraries, port 
80 has been blocked too in order to prevent the librarians from accessing 
web e-mails and discussion boards.

The pattern that emerges is therefore an attempt to block direct 
communication, for power-keeping reasons, under the pretext of security. 
But the sysops are strangely inefficient about it too. As to the libraries, 
blocking port 80 does exclude most of the web e-mails, but not katamail, 
for instance (<http://www.katamail.com>http://www.katamail.com ) And if IE 
Messenger is not accessible, Yahoo messenger is (I wrote Yahoo to get the 
number of the port, but got no answer so far). It is, here as in NYC, a 
question of power and control. Here, the general ignorance of teachers 
makes the crude blocking of ports possible. Sure those in charge of 
"informatics" should know better (I teach French and English as foreign 
languages). They do not really care. Or rather didn't until they started 
getting the info as to the blocked ports, because they were not primarily 
interested in direct communication. They got rather irritated when they 
found out, and asked me to open ! an msn web community for at least 
asynchronous communication between teachers.

Because this is allowed us, differently from NYC. Out of inefficiency, 
again. I've been pestering education authorities for an interactive 
solution for the last three years: just for practical reasons, because we 
have school reforms going on, and the authorities "consult" us about them 
(even if what they do of our answers is a mystery). 43 schools means a lot 
of paper work in such consultations. The new site for the schools 
<http://www.scuoladic.ch>http://www.scuoladic.ch was meant to have a 
message board, which was censored at the last moment (I know this from the 
WM) by "authorities". But as "authorities" do not know about on-line 
interactive solutions, I got away with 2 msn communities, the one for the 
teachers, and another one for the kids coming from other cultural backgrounds.

Last joke in this Swiss farce: on Thursday, the "experts in informatics" 
(midway in the hierarchy between political power and teachers, with no 
particular qualification for most of them, but well connected politically) 
asked me to apply to join their group. I laughed at them. Thanks to William 
J. Hart, I've become reasonably proficient at using the internet, playing 
with Cc lines in e-mails, etc. But I know nothing about tech, and still 
occasionally get onto the wrong side of html. Mainly, I have no intention 
to play their cover-up game.

Sincerely

Claude Almansi

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From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavitt () hotmail com>
To: declan () well com
Cc: john () elfrank org
Subject: Re: FC: NYC schools reportedly adopt restrictive web linking, use 
rules
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 01:19:44 -0700

... sets a new standard for brilliance in public policy... sounds like they 
put a lot of thought and consideration into this... NOT. Grr.

... if they are serious about opposing this, I suggest that teachers, at 
the grassroots, conduct an effective "Denial of Service" attack by flooding 
these guys with as many individual pages of content as you can come up 
with... write scripts to convert the "fortune" files on your machines into 
simple web pages if you have to... download the Gutenberg project and write 
a script to convert each book into a collection of pages... grab a public 
domain image database and write a script to wrap pages into web pages, 
sorted into categories... there's easily a few gigabytes of data there, and 
several hundred thousand auto generated web pages...

I would hope that, confronted with the task of manually reviewing 100,000+ 
pages of content (that's only 100 pages per school and probably only two or 
three pages of content per teacher), and the ensuing flood of complaints 
from teachers, parents, students, administrators about stuff not being 
available in a timely fashion, the district might get a clue.

If my children's district were this stupid (instead of being technically 
handicapped), you can be sure they'd hear from me in short order.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt

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From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei () rsasecurity com>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Cc: john () elfrank org
Subject: RE: NYC schools reportedly adopt restrictive web linking, use rul
        es
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 10:05:51 -0400

> Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:20:47 -0400
> From: Seth Johnson <seth.johnson () realmeasures dyndns org>
> Organization: Real Measures
> Subject: New NYC Board of Ed. Web Publishing Policy - REALITYCHECK,
> please.
>
> (Forwarded from WWWEDU list)
>
> John Elfrank-Dana wrote:
>  >
>  > I hope everyone is having a good time at NECC.
>
>  > 2. A district censor is supposed to review all the material of each
> site
>  > and have it moved to the public viewing area, assuming it's in
>  > compliance with the new acceptable use policy, which includes no links
>  > to sites that have a commercial advertisement.  The censors will move
>  > the content along at "their earliest possible convenience."
>  > 3. No chats or asynchronous bulletin boards allowed!
>
This is, of course, idiotic. Has the school board also ordered the removal
from school
libraries of all books and magazines which include commercial advertising?

[Actually, the 1A should scotch this in any reasonable system of justice.]

Peter Trei

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