"Barry Smoke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> We will need to allow students to use this only to do research, recieve
> valid attachments (ie...research pictures, zip files containing valid
> material, etc.). We do not have the staff to police the proper use
> of this though, and any porn links, dirty pictures, etc....will not
> be tolerated. Please concider this a technical question, and not an
> ethical/legal one.
Ahh--that's easier. You can't do what you've just described.
If students can receive legitimate pictures, but not illegitimate
ones, then you need a way to distinguish the two. There may be AI which
can, for example, identify photos of naked women, but there is nothing
out there of practical use which can do it.
If there were, then you would still have a problem; if your students are
researching classical art, then they will not be able to view (presumably
legitimate) paintings of nudes.
So you can forget about spotting ``bad'' photos, video, audio, and the
like. The only way to catch these is to forbid all attachments of that
class.
As for zip files--you can't examine the contents without unzipping them.
That alone will significantly impair mail performance. However, you can do
it. Once you do, the above objection applies to photos, video, etc.
That leaves text. By ``text'', I mean pdf, postscript, plain text, html,
Word documents, and possibly more. Each of these can be converted to plain
text, at fairly significant performance cost. If you're not daunted yet,
we can just call them ``text''.
Then yup, you can scan text for a list of forbidden words and phrases.
As Steve Wolfe said, you can log the matches, forward them to admins,
whatever you want.
Of course, scanning on racial epithets will flag children reading Mark
Twain. Ordinary cuss-word scanning will flag most literature.
Bottom line: your goal still needs some clarification.
Len.
--
Gee. What if the spammer keeps trying to send more messages---forever?
What if you get billions of connections from faked IP addresses?
...Please don't waste my time on nonexistent efficiency problems.
-- Dan Bernstein
