After presenting an internet Workshop at last year's Denver X-ray conference I heard quite a few interesting stories from the audience - most of which seemed to mainly originate from US corporations(?). Company names deleted, these include: A company insisting that each exact URL you wanted to be specified in advance so they could set the permissions that you could receive these (and only these) URLs. The best one I heard was a company that had "hidden" content filters to check the content and make sure not of it was inappropriate. To check for pornographic material, they would do checks on the string "X-rated". However, their system would only use the first 4 characters - "X-ra". One of the company powder diffractionists got hauled over the coals for browsing pornographic material. It seems he did a web search for "X-rays" I also know of some companies that will not let their ordinary staff browse on the real World Wide Web. They have to request the site they are interested in browsing through - and these are then downloaded by the IT department onto local network hard-disks for off-line browsing. I'm sure there must be more stories like this out there? --- Quite a few useful sites have the ~ symbol in them - as they are individual homepages. Why not try Stefan Webers Crystallography and Quasicrystal homepage (with much good free DOS and Java software): http://www.nirim.go.jp/~weber/ Cheers, Lachlan.
I have a query for the Chemistry-Internet community at-large, but particularly for industrial sites. Our corporate IT department recently completed the installation of a firewall/proxy for all Internet traffic and one of the "protections" they have implemented is a filtering process that prohibits access to certain URLs (sites) - some explicitly and others by somewhat generic rules. One such generic rule is the the presence of a tilde (~) in the URL. Tilde's are often used as a shortcut representation of a home directory (particularly on Unix systems). For some reason our IT department considers such sites as inappropriate for business/research purposes. It now take VP approval to unblock such sites. Has anyone else heard of, experienced, or fully understand such a policy?
[This message was multi-posted, please pardon any duplication]
- Jack
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jack A. Smith || Union Carbide || Phone: (304) 747-5797 Catalyst Skill Center || FAX: (304) 747-5571 P.O. Box 8361 || S. Charleston, WV 25303 || smithja@ucarb.com -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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Lachlan Cranswick - Melbourne, Australia _--_|\ Phone/Fax : (613) 9455-1345 / \ E-mail : lachlan@melbpc.org.au \_.--._/ Mobile Phone/Voice Mail : 0412-1141-31 v Crystallographic WWW : http://www.unige.ch/crystal/stxnews/stx/volnteer.htm chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)