Within days of the official launch of microsoft’s new ‘bing’ search engine, users have found ways to exploit it, in order to get around corporate firewall, filtering and policy options for viewing explicit pornographic and otherwise prohibited material.
The site streams video and places images directly into to the browser on the bing page, bypassing the original web address and thus avoiding any url based filtering. Explicit content is only shown to users who have set there adult content filtering to off, put this is on a user by user basis, which companies have very little control over, the default is to safe search for users that are not logged in, under a user profile.
Microsoft already have produced a work around, enabling IT departments to block all explicit content. This works very simply by redirecting all explicit results to the web address http://explicit.microsoft.com which can then be blacklisted on firewalls and filter lists.
This morning the urls were already being blocked by websense and other filtering services, and the bing.com server was reportedly receiving so many requests it was not able to allow users in to log in under their own profile.
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David Coxon's IT Weblog 