Living with Bess (the dog)

Bess is a service run by a Seattle based company called N2H2 (www.n2h2.com).  Unlike some Internet filtering solutions, Bess is not a software program installed on individual computers. Instead, Bess operates at the server, or network level, and provides filtering for every computer on the network. The Bess servers for Morgan Local are located at SEOVEC (www.seovec.org) whose offices are in Athens.  There are three servers that handle all Internet traffic for the school districts connected to SEOVEC.  Bess does not filter e-mail. It does keep a log of the web sites your computer has seen.

• Pornographic or sexually explicit material.
• Illegal Material – drug markets, on-line gambling, warez, phreaking and cracking sites (sites that copy software illegally, steal credit cards, steal cell phone numbers, steal or destroy credit or medical information etc.)
• Hate and extremist groups – Nazis, militias, skinheads etc.
• Free Email: Sites that offer e-mail accounts over the Web for free. Such sites can expose users to harmful content delivered via e-mail file attachments. Blocking such sites also helps to enforce local acceptable-use policies when e-mail is already provided locally to users.
• School Cheating Info Pages: Any site that promotes plagiarism or similar cheating among students (such as by offering term papers, exam keys, etc.)
• Tobacco and Drug Use Advocating or promoting recreational use of tobacco, alcohol or other drugs.
• Free Page Websites: - see description below.

Bess uses a combination of automated blocking and human review to make up the “block list” of sites that Bess will not fetch.

Automated Blocking

The automated blocking occurs when a web site URL contains obvious references to inappropriate material such as www.sexygirls.com.  The automated blocking software does not search the contents of a page to determine whether the site contains sexually explicit material. It is looking at the site URL.

Free Domains are Blocked

Sites where web page space is offered for free have historically done nothing to prevent capricious abuse of their services.  Millions of new pages appear on these servers daily.  Individual pages that have been reviewed by N2H2 on such sites are removed from the block list.  A few well-known free servers are geocities.com, xoom.com, and anglefire.com.  Free sites are where Bess gets the most complaints – “I wanted to see something about rose gardens and Bess blocked it!  Stupid <mumble> dog.”  The site was probably hosted on geocities.

If you want to see a blocked site on geocities.com (or other free server), you must specifically request a Bess Review.  Simply click the Request Review button.  Type in your e-mail address and a short note explaining the content of the page.  You don’t have to plead and beg, just let them know about the site. It has been my experience that it usually takes about a week for a person at N2H2 to respond to your request.

How is a student supposed gather research when Bess blocks sites from searches such as “Sperm Whales” or “Pornography Laws” or “Nazi Holocaust”?   These and other search terms are often bring up blocked pages.  Here are several ways to make your life easier when researching with Bess.

1.  Plan your research.  Give your students at least four good web sites to begin their quest.  This means you will have to do some work ahead of time, but it will make class time more productive if they have a starting point.

2.  Use Searchopolis.com.  Searchopolis is a search engine run by N2H2.  It works as well as the larger commercial search engines but doesn’t lead to blocked links.

3. Search the Links to Educational Resources (http://www.mlsd.k12.oh.us/tech/docs/links.htm) There are dozens of hand picked sites that are organized and described on our very own web server.