I'm forwarding this important message from UNET concerning filtering which
must be in place Monday for the schools in our state.  PLEASE NOTE: NO
FILTERING IS REQUIRED OR WILL BE TURNED ON FOR LIBRARIES BECAUSE OF THE CIPA
DECISION.

Edna M. Comstock
Coordinator Learning & Technology Services
E-Rate Team Leader
Maine State Library
64 State House Station
Augusta, ME 04333-0064
[log in to unmask]
1-800-322-8899


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Letourneau [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 3:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Central content filtering for MSLN


In order to meet the requirements imposed by federal law (CIPA) and
eliminate the risk of MSLN losing E-rate funding, content filtering will be
turned on for all schools connected to MSLN on July 1, 2002.  There will be
no filtering of public libraries at this time. There will be no direct cost
to the individual schools for this filtering service.

The evolution of filtering products is changing rapidly. UNET has reviewed a
number of products and still have two that are viable. We would like to
select the one that will cause the least disruption in service and provide
the best service to MSLN in the long term. That selection has not as yet
been finalized. We have selected one of the candidate products for this
initial production trial.

N2H2's Sentian FS will be used as of July 1 but may not be the long term
solution.  Unlike N2H2's Bess product, Sentian FS does not act as a proxy,
but rather, works in conjunction with the Cisco web cache engines that we
have been running on MSLN for the past few years.  This new architecture is
much more scalable and should eliminate the performance problems that the
Bess proxies have in the past.

A major feature that is missing from Sentian FS at this time is distributed
management. This feature is considered an absolute requirement for MSLN to
allow TC's to have local control and management of filtering categories for
their schools. We will be working with N2H2 over the next couple of months
to help them define and implement a distributed management interface for the
fall.  These efforts will allow us to meet the requirements of the law
during this interim period. The lower level of activity over the summer
months should minimize any impact to schools. The extent of N2H2's success
in delivering the distributed management features in a timely fashion will
be a major factor in an eventual purchase decision.

On July 1, we will be implementing a global filtering policy for all
schools. In an attempt not to over filter, we have selected those categories
considered most offensive. The categories that will be filtered are as
follows:



Filtered categories:

 Adults Only
 Nudity
 Pornography
 Sex
 Hate/Discrimination
 Illegal
 Violence

Exceptions:

 Education
 Medical
 For Kids
 Moderated
 History
 Text/Spoken Only

Exceptions allow access to web sites that may have value for your school but
are marked as belonging to one of the blocked categories. For example,
Violence (under Blocks) and History (under Exceptions) are both turned on so
violent sites are allowed only if they present violent material in a
historical context.

We are also implementing a single global override account that will allow
you to bypass the filtering rules at an individual computer.  When presented
with a blocked page, you will have the option of bypassing the filters by
entering the override username, password and the amount of time you would
like the bypass to last. A small popup window will appear on computer screen
that allows you to manually restore filtering for the computer if you are
done before the bypass times out. The override name and password that we
have defined are:

Override name: override

Password: m5ln.mte@f



We may be changing this override information periodically during the summer.
(Shared secrets tend not to be very secret.)  If we do, we will make sure we
announce the change in order to minimize its impact on you and the MSLN help
desk.

If you are currently using a filtering product in your environment we would
suggest that you continue to use it as it may better reflect your local
choices of what should or should not be filtered. The global filtering we
will be doing should not significantly impact any of your current filtering.
If you have a license that is scheduled to renew in the near future, you may
elect not to renew that license and avail yourself of the global filtering
being provided over MSLN.

Once again, our goal is to ultimately allow each school to manage their own
filtering categories and locally define individual override accounts.

Some problems relating to this filtering may well arise as we work with you
to meet the requirements of the law.  We asked for your patience, help and
cooperation. If you have any questions or encounter any problems, please
contact the helpdesk at 1-888-367-6756 or [log in to unmask]

--
Jeffrey Letourneau
Manager of Network Operations
University Network - UNET
University of Maine System