At today’s IT Roundtable at ACS’ Convention, I talked about selectively blocking some media on social networking sites. I’m being nebulous in my wording because I’m paranoid. I don’t want one of the big brothers to stumble across this post and change their sites so they break my blocks. I know it probably wouldn’t happen, but like I said - I’m being paranoid.

In any case, we block sites categorized as “Radio,” including Pandora, Last.fm, etc. I also block the below sites that are used for streaming music and video on users’ profiles.  This doesn’t block all video, but it blocks pretty much all streaming music.  We’re doing this because our staff were eating all of our bandwidth with streaming audio, so I turned it off to allow for vital ministry purposes.

Related posts

• ACS Convention: IT Roundtable (0)
• Fun with E-mail (1)
• OpenDNS Rocks (3)
• Protecting young (and not so young) eyes (2)
• Protecting your network from outside invaders (2)

1. SJ Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am

   Bummer! No Pandora? I understand on the bandwidth though…

2. Epiktetus Says:
   May 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am

   I’ve taken a different approach: Any time I see (or hear) someone listening to streaming radio I let them know why I’ve considered blocking it altogether. We have several people that are here on weekends, evenings, early mornings, etc. So far they have all been good enough to limit their bandwidth hogging to those times.

   For a couple of people I’ve told them about this fancy new gadget that can grab music right out of the air, and you don’t even need a connection to the Internet! It’s called a radio. :) Two people have even brought them in after I talked to them.