HCS Staff Tech Blog Message

This blog is written with the HCS Staff as the primary audience.
Anyone not a member of the HCS Staff may find certain content does not apply to their Google Account.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Bypassing Internet Content Filter (Lightspeed)

As we all know, school districts are required to responsibly block inappropriate websites.  Sometimes, however, sites get blocked that should not be.  Adult users at HCS have the ability to override the filter for certain categories of sites, such as "Social Media".  

More and more sites have been switched to include encryption making the website more secure.  This is generally denoted by the "s" at the end of the http in the address field of your web browser and looks like this:

Our filter deals with these sites with no problem but when a staff member attempts to browse to one of these sites the Lightspeed filter is supposed to prompt you with a blue Lightspeed blocked page.  This page has a link toward the top on the left that requests you to log in.  Click the "(Not you?)" link and you will be prompted to log in.



Use your Active Directory (computer) UserID and Password to login to the Lightspeed Filter.  Click the login button and you will be logged into the filter for a period of 15 minutes enabling you to go to sites that are normally blocked but not considered to be explicit (containing "Adult" content).  

Sites that use the encryption (https://) confuse our filter a bit and cause it to have a bit of difficulty prompting with the "(Not you?)" link.  In this case, you may encounter a page that looks like this and from here you may not know what to do:



When you encounter a problem getting to a site that does not give you the blue blocked page yet you still need to bypass the filter, you can always browse to the following address:


Here you will encounter the Lightspeed login page:


Use your Active Directory (computer) UserID and Password to login to the Lightspeed Filter.  Click the login button and you will be logged into the filter for a period of 15 minutes enabling you to go to the site.  

No comments:

Post a Comment