Need to Block Facebook, MySpace and Twitter

[marciab]

In our libraries we have computers that are used only to look up books. We have them locked down pretty tight with Group Policy but they still seem to find a way to get to Facebook and the like. I have tried adding these sites to the restricted sites in the Security but I can still access them. Is there something else I need to do? Or another policy I can use? Thank you.

[t001z]

This is going to be a very daunting task done by simply trying to block these sites. As anyone with teenagers will tell you, a simple web proxy will bypass what you are trying to do. A perfect example is going to ZendProxy.com (or any of 10,000 others) but the top of their page says it all "Web Proxy - Unblock Myspace- Surf Anonymously". I have several friends who have gone to painstaking measures to try to do this themselves without much luck - they are always chasing down the new ones to try to block.

I had to connect to my home server to access that page since our web filtering software blocks all "Filter Avoidance" software. This is really what you would need if you truly want to block these sites. If you give them access to the address bar, there really is no other way. (unless someone knows a way to make it so "anything but" your-library.com = 127.0.0.1, even that won't help if they set a proxy server up at their house or know the IP)

If you are looking for Filtering software, you can go with some of the enterprise products (websense, surfcontrol, scansafe and more) or if it is a small deployment, maybe something loaded locally and managed locally may work (and be cheaper).

Since you mentioned libraries, there may be something of interest to you here: Content-control software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which talks about filters but even more so about half-way down the page.

I know this isn't what you are looking for but I hope it helps.