topic Getting around url redirects and safe search in General Topics

Getting around url redirects and safe search

mlaporte — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:02:00 GMT

Hello,

I'm fighting a losing battle trying to get forced safe search working. I'm currently trying to put a dans guardian and squid filter on the outside of my PA to handle just searches to as many search engines as I can find redirects for.

Has anyone else tried to do this or anything like it? There has got to be a better way to handle safe searches than what I'm doing.

Thanks

Mike

Re: Getting around url redirects and safe search

mikand — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:55:34 GMT

According to this page google, yahoo and bing uses safesearch by get-request:

http://www.safesquid.com/html/portal.php?page=137

Google: &safe=active

Yahoo: &vm=r

Bing: &adlt=strict

So im thinking if its possible to create custom-appids which are based on lets say google-search but you add that the get-query must contain &safe=active (in the end of the line) and then only allow this custom_google-search for urls with *.google.* as url?

However as long as you allow various anonymizers the clients can still bypass your restriction.

Did you try to contact the app-id team at PaloAlto to see if they can create a better appid which would only allow safe-searches?

Re: Getting around url redirects and safe search

mlaporte — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:10:05 GMT

Hi,

I did contact support and was re-directed to a few support documents/pages that had different rules in them and they worked but they didn't re-write the url it just put a block page up if it wasn't safe search. Unfortunately that won't work in our environment.

Thanks

Mike

Re: Getting around url redirects and safe search

mikand — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:21:24 GMT

Then unfortunately I think your current option is to implement a device similar to safesquid to do the rewriting of the urls.

Check this thread (among others) regarding placing a webproxy inline with a PA-device: