Intro
Have you ever looked at a school or work filter or blocking service and thought “Who in their right mind thought this was a good implementation?”, Join the club.
“Modern” filters like Securly, Blocksi, and Gogaurdian use the same blocking methods as they did 20 years ago, and did they implement those archaic blocking methods any better than the first internet filters? Not really.
While the modern internet has some content like pornography, computer viruses, and gore that should be blocked, and sure gaming shouldn’t be the first priority in school, but most modern filters block content that is Educational, sometimes even blocking it for the reason of being “Educational”. Seems backwards? It is.
These filters block educational sites such as coding resources like w3schools and Replit, they block resources ADHD students like me rely on, youtube music to help my brain concentrate, the decency of allowing me to install a dark mode extension, blocking a student at the school’s personal blog, when it contains nothing that could be even vaguely considered inappropriate for school.
Wildcards and overblocking.
Do these filters actually succeed in blocking games and other unwanted content? Nope, they let all that through while blocking legitimate sites. For example let’s go through how archaic this filter is with an example: One student wants to access “https://www.sites.google.com/site/xgames6996”, a site chock full of games and tools students shouldn’t be using, another wants to access “https://sites.google.com/lesliehawks.net/history” a site about the history of the school website, and the last student wants to access “google.com”, guess which students are blocked?If you said none you're right, if you said all, you’re also correct. Lots of these filters are so imprecise that that can’t differentiate subdomains, they interpret sites.google.com, google.com, mail.google.com, all as the same block entry of *.google.com/*, so if you block it? You’re screwed, 75% of the internet is blocked and you have to use bing, but if you don’t block it? All the traffic gets through, both those genuine emails and historical sites, and the unwanted games.
So, is there an actual way to solve this problem? Yes, there’s one big problem that these smaller problem root from: URL level precision, Now while original firewall may have used overarching rules to block entire domains to save precious storage space in the 1990s, modern computers have more than enough overhead to store the string “https://www.sites.google.com/site/xgames6996” or “https://www.sites.google.com/site/*game*” instead of “*.google.com/*”.
Real world example of wildcard usage.
n.href = r.replace(/^./, "").indexOf("*") < 0 ? r : function(e) { const t = "*" === e[0] ? e.substr(1) : e; return `http://${0===t.indexOf(".")?`www.${t.substring(1)}`:t}` }(r) This code is from the leaked 2022 source code for the Blocksi Enterprise Edition Chrome extension. Now while most of the people reading this probably can’t make sense of it, you don’t really need to, the important part is that it normalizes the URL stored in the Database to remove and wildcards(*), a wildcard means any value can be put there as in our example earlier with *.google.com which also blocked mail.google.com and sites.google.com, so any string can be substituted for *.
Now why is this important you might ask? Well the existence of a function to remove wildcards for displaying to the user in the first place gives good reason to believe that the database storing blocked urls, is saving them with wildcards as opposed to more specific URL strings. This means the filter treats entire subdomains as one block entry, which makes fine-grained control impossible and causes legitimate sites to be unfairly blocked.
Impact on instructional time and student learning
As for specific domains like a student who goes to the school’s personal blog being blocked, that’s not a specific error on the part of the code. While it is a problem that such a site is being flagged, it’s more of a problem that it gets blocked before a human actually looks at it and checks to make sure they’re actually blocking something they should be. One last thing before we conclude, it’s not just websites that have a false-positive problem, it also exists within the Google suite of tools, Educational videos from channels like LegalEagle are blocked, such as his video I Joined With 500 Law Firms To Fight The Trump Administration and along with a similar video discussing how EO 14230 was blocked, not only should these videos not have any trigger keywords, they’re actually educational content, diving into the specific laws and regulations used to reach a decision, while gaming content creator from massive gaming channel is easily accessible.Personal challenges faced due to filter
Such blocks of educational sites have personally affected me when trying to research for a individual project in my Modern World Issues class I was doing I titled “Corruption, Control, And Cases”, a project that goes over concerns of Corruption with the !TRUMP memecoin dinner, Control with the checks and balances of the US government, and how they may have been compromised to some degree, and Cases such as Civil Action No. 25-716 (BAH) which overturned the illegitimate executive order EO 14230. I ran into several issues accessing Legal Eagle and similar videos, which go in-depth from a perspective of law on these issues.
Conclusion
So to conclude, current filters and blocks fall behind technological advancements in the modern era, block sites they shouldn’t, and allow sites they shouldn’t. They use the same basic code and wildcard containing databases as even older filters, and overall do more harm than good in their current state.
Date of writing: 2025-05-20