Re: [school-discuss] GitHub "banned" somewhere [was: <Open Source program hosting question>]

[LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx>]

Manoj wrote:
>You can have your own GItHub server. dear .

If I had my own server, I wouldn't be asking if there was a good
hosting alternative to Sourceforge.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Damiano Verzulli  wrote:
> I'm really curious as... even tough there could be plenty of websites
> that could be "banned"/"censored" in a school-district scenario for
> several reasons, I really see _NO_ reason in blocking GitHub. Do you have
> details?

Another department handles the situation but from what I understand,
they have a set list they get from their vendor as to what's blocked.
It does quite a lot of filtering including most https sites (like the
Arch Linux site).  Sourceforge was also blocked for a very long time.
They've only recently decided to unblock Facebook, Twitter and Youtube
and that's only because administrators have been pushing that people
get on these systems to keep up with what's going on in the district.
I'd think it would be rather inconvenient for the superintendent to
say to follow him on Twitter or Facebook and employees can't even
access it during work hours.  My guess is they filter on keywords and
they're a bit over zealous on their keywords.  They prefer to have
more sites blocked to be on the safe side.  One can request a site be
unblocked, but it's a lot of red tape.

They have things so locked down that if you don't have admin rights
(which is most teachers), you can't install software on your machines.
I typically recommend portable apps to teachers in that situation.
Even with that work-around, the software needs to be on the district's
list of officially approved software.  I talked to one ITSA who put in
a lot of work just to get tuxpaint and tuxmath on the approved list.
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