I must admit to being skeptical about any such innovation, and I’ve been listening to both sides of the debate on the BytesForAll mailing list. Despite my skepticism, Osama’s questions have some answers, and I’d like to present them for comment.

• India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers—just 456 teachers per million people.
• Seventy-two percent of our primary schools have only three teachers or less.
• 25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were teaching, during unannounced visits to a nationally representative sample of government primary schools.

How is the $35 tablet going to solve any of these problems?

Of course technology on its own is not going to solve these problems. It is just a valuable weapon in the armoury of those who would launch an all-out war on poverty (and other abstract nouns).

Kentaro Toyama, an ex-Microsoft guru turned ICT4D researcher, says that “technology is [just] an amplifier of human intent and capacity.” And when faced with a task that’s possible but simply too large, an amplifier is exactly what we need. It doesn’t need to be high tech. Tanzania did just fine with radio, one of the oldest, simplest and most inclusive ICTs:

About ten years after independence, Tanzania decided to move towards universal primary education, almost doubling the number of children in school. The government estimated that it needed an extra 40,000 teachers. As the existing training colleges were producing only 5,000 new teachers a year, it was decided to recruit secondary school leavers and train them on an apprenticeship model, partly on the job and partly through distance education. Over a period of three years, they were posted in schools where they had a reduced teaching load. They then followed correspondence courses backed by radio programmes; they were supervised and tested on their classroom practices, and passed their examinations. Two evaluations found that they ended up reasonably competent in the classroom (Chale, 1993; quoted by Perranton, 2000; retrieved from UNU)

If India were to launch a massive teacher education programme, they would find it cheaper to implement that programme using technology. For example, they might distribute radios, TVs, portable audio players or even (heaven forbid!) computers to trainee teachers. It might take longer for those teachers to reach high standards, and more might drop out, without the personal connection and feedback of face-to-face training. Even so, one could train more teachers for more time and achieve a similar number of fully trained teachers at a lower cost.

In the business sector, more than 70% micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are not connected to information society to leverage opportunities of business and efficiency. How will the $35 tablet help in the financial inclusion of MSMEs, which are largely situated in small towns and remote areas?

It’s unfortunate that the tablet doesn’t include a long-range wireless network (such as GPRS), which must surely cover most of India as it does Africa. Even without an Internet connection, it can still provide useful services such as record keeping, business accounting and stock tracking to small enterprises. The tablet is based on Android, but the marketplace has been disabled, and this is a serious limitation. I think it’s likely to be overcome soon. When that happens, India’s many skilled software developers will be free to create localised applications for a potentially huge local market.

Most of India’s 3.3 million non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are also located in remote areas—70% of them lack any sort of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure or connectivity, and have no websites.

How can the $35 tablet help these NGOs’ global outreach efforts or aid the millions of people working with them in rural areas?

You probably know the answer to this question as well as I do: The same way as computer and phones can, only more so. Helping people to communicate and to do their work is exactly what ICTs do. All of them. With the possible exception of Angry Birds. A computer can help us to make leaflets, track visits to patients and beneficiaries, diagnose illnesses, improve farming techniques, or learn about anything we wish to know in the whole world of knowledge.

Can it bring transparency in governance at this level?

Good question. Not by itself, sure. Transparency comes from open data. The people might get together to publish what the government would rather hide, or pressure the government to release the data, but a $35 tablet won’t help them much.

When they do release that data, however, the usual problem is how to make use of it. Government data tends to be massive and unwieldy, and answering difficult questions takes much time and significant skill even with the best of data. I think that free, open, widecast media provide the biggest opportunity to make real use of transparency, and our use of the Internet as an enabler of democracy is the best example of that. Potentially, a simple but powerful Internet device could help bring people together to investigate and answer those difficult questions. But by the sound of it, this tablet is not quite there yet. Hopefully it will be soon.

Since a large population of our country communicate verbally, and cannot read and write with ease, their preferred medium of content consumption and content production is audio-visual… But to make use of good multimedia content, you need powerful machines, not cheap and underperforming ones.

I disagree with that. I grew up with “multimedia content” on BBC Micros: simple games, moving blocks around a screen, simple word processors and spreadsheets and databases and graphics. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a simple, clear diagram can be worth far more than a complex, confusing one. Advanced graphics are no substitute for a visual designer’s ingenuity and skill. Wikipedia is “multimedia content” that is perfectly suited to a $35 tablet.

If the $35 tablet can do anything good to education in India, the only way is by handing them to each and every teacher and school management staff to monitor the workings and functioning of the school and its teachers…

Monitoring is an interesting application, and a double-edged sword. Robert Chambers, the inventor of participatory rural appraisal, told us a story at the recent ICT4D Finale event in Cambridge of a hospital in India where the nurses were given mobile phones “to collect data at the source.” But the director of the hospital used it to monitor what they were doing, effectively spying on them. The nurses went on strike and eventually the director was fired. I think that for monitoring to have a positive benefit, it must be done with consent and a shared vision to use the data to improve performance, not to criticise and control.

rather than assuming that each student will buy Aakash and India will become digitally literate overnight.

I have to agree with that sentiment, although I’m not sure who raised it. Kapil Sibal, who takes the credit for inventing the $35 tablet, merely said:

This low cost device is part of our national mission on education through information and communication technology (NME-ICT) which will connect over 1,000 institutions across the country, enabling tonnes of web-based course content for free.

Now that doesn’t sound so far-fetched, does it?

In the past I have used Adobe fireworks which seemed unrivalled in the open source world but pngquant is just great.

The command line tool allows you to squish the 32bit png files output from Inkscape into 8 bit files with any number of colours from 2 to 255. To make the test I used an 11.9 kB inkscape file which when processed using pngquant and 24 colours was perfectly acceptable and now had only a 3.1 kB file size. Yippee!!. I’m a happy bunny

(MyPaint bunny 39 kB -> Gimp bunny 53 kB -> happy pngquant bunny 13 kB)

Aptivate work almost exclusively with open source software so it seems a great idea to give Microsoft the push, and frankly I’d had enough of waiting 9 minutes for my laptop to reboot. That’s enough time for making 6 people a cup of tea, water the plants and rearrange the desk; all good things ONCE a day not 5 times when the PC crashes. 3 years of filling up with junk makes a Windows PC very very sluggish and an unhappy designer with a tidy workspace.

Changing over – a gradual process

Leaving Microsoft was never going to a straight switch. Leaving a web platform if you are dependent on it for your income is a scary thing.

Since i cut my design teeth on Apple Macs and Adobe software in 1995, I have moved gradually to Windows in a bid to be one step closer to the end user who on the whole use this platform. I was still, however heavily dependent on Adobe products, primarily Fireworks and Dreamweaver for interface design and development, but also Illustrator for vector graphics and Photoshop for photo editing. I know they are good, but really? couldn’t I achieve a good web result without them?

Open source alternatives within Windows.

Going back a bit to before the anger towards the laptop really kicked in. Finding open source alternatives was an exciting challenge. These were readily available for Windows so I didn’t have to switch, just try them out. I found a really useful website www.osalt.com which helps you to find open source alternatives to commercial software.

Web development – Aptana 2

Essentially I wanted an html/css editor with code completion, ftp client and project manager.. I tried Amaya, Bluefish KompoZer and Mozilla SeaMonkey which all had great features, but none of them did ALL the things I wanted together and I really was a bit spoilt by having them all rolled into one with Dreamweaver. Finally I found Aptana 2 which whilst a bit fiddly to get started with seemed to have everything I needed, hurray!

• Best thing about Aptana – has to be the available plugin support for different types of project such as php, python/django, javascript, svn and git. It’s very comprehensive.

• What I miss the most from Dreamweaver – nothing… had I still been dependent on the WYSIWYG editor in Dreamweaver then I could argue that this would be a bit deal, but since most of my work is now with dynamic database driven sites, I tend to use Firebug to make visual tweaks before committing them to code.

Web design – Inkscape

A key part of my work involves developing brand assets, icons and other vector graphics for both web and print design. For this I had depended on Illustrator. Quite quickly however I discovered Inkscape . What an amazing product! it’s a bit clunky but it lets me do 90% of the key design tasks I did in Illustrator and 60% of tasks I used to do in Fireworks. Essentially it is the easiest transition I have made on this journey and means that I now only use Inkscape for designing for the web.

• Best thing about Inkscape – The ability to export 32 bit png files from any selection, the page or object. The other best bit is all the native SVG features I have yet to discover!
• What I miss the most from Illustrator – nothing worth mentioning.
• What I miss the most from Fireworks – Image optimisation – no image editing software that I’m aware of does a better job of compressing and optimising all nature of image files than Fireworks. It creates an 8 bit alpha png with a tiny size and smooth, edging where transparent bits kick in. This for me is the single most important missing feature of any open source alternative. Inkscape needs a good image optimising tool.

Photo editing – Gimp

Scaling, cropping, optimising photos; that’s a big part of creating photographic content for a website. Mainly I leave that to the end user but sometimes I create photo-based graphics too.
Gimp seems the most logical choice, as it suggests so itself, but I’m not finding it intuitive and it seems to crash more often than not. Fireworks has a limited range of bitmap editing tools compared to Photoshop but integrates really well within the context of creating an interface design as bitmap and vector graphic objects live happily on the same layer or multiple layers. Now there are several open source alternatives for this work such as but I’ll admit that I’m not finding a great solution and again it’s the optimisation issue that makes me frustrated.

Designing for Low Bandwidth

If we need to create websites with small file sizes for countries with low bandwidth then we need powerful optimisers. I found that Fireworks was great because of the high compression rates achievable which result in files more than half the size achievable using other programmes, open source or commercial. So here is a proposal for a future project for Aptivate – create an 8 bit Alpha transparency image optimiser that challenges Fireworks.

Switching to Ubuntu

A couple of months later I reformatted and partitioned the hard drive of my Dell Precision 9300 workstation. I still wanted access to Windows, so did a dual boot with an extra partition for shared files. Apart from my video card packing in unexpectedly (nothing to do with the installation I’m assured) , the installation went without a hitch. I was amazed by how intuitive the Ubuntu interface was. Using the software install centre, I was able to quickly and directly install all the applications I needed. Start up and shut down was a mere seconds and as I was in production mode within a couple of hours. I was more than happy to find Dropbox, Skype and Acrobat Reader were also available. All in all it was pain free, and… Ubuntu is actually graphically beautiful (not something I had anticipated at all).

The dreaded Terminal

Well it’s inevitable even for a designer. The WYSIWYG addicts worst fear, THE TERMINAL!!! agghh!! . A Baptism of code fire at Aptivate, no namby pamby intro here. I had pulled down the designer’s defence gate and in trickled (and sometimes poured) an endless stream of code, configuration files, settings, database fixtures, tables, smart tricks and speedy scripts, screen sharing and networking wizardry. Ah! then I had a cup of tea. I’ll be a terminal ninja one day.

Do I miss Windows?

I don’t miss windows. I booted into it shortly after installing Ubuntu, and found it an empty experience, like going back to a house I you’ve just moved out of but still have keys to. Can’t find the kettle to make a cup of tea so not staying. I recently installed virtual box and now run several different versions of Windows XP to help me cross-browser debug CSS.

Moving forward

Apart from using my new open source toolbox to help Aptivate refresh it’s current website, there are things I want to do. It would be great to contribute to the open source community and generally help to improve already great products such as Inkscape. I’ve already started submitting Inkscape icons to the Open Clip Art Library and it would be great if we developed the image optimiser I mentioned before. There is also a lot of potential in interactive svg’s which would be great to explore especially since Internet Explorer 9 supports them.. oh Microsoft you are never forgotten…

If you are designer reading this, and fancy getting involved with Aptivate’s open source efforts somehow, get in touch. If you are a developer and have a secret optimiser up your sleeve, please let us feed you and keep you amused because we want it!!!

• SARPAM is a current Re-Action project to share drug price data across Southern Africa, helping countries negotiate a better deal from drug suppliers.
• IHP+Results is another Re-Action project, just completed, to promote accountability among IHP signatories by sharing information on their health service improvements and progress towards meeting their Millennium Development Goals.

You can find the source code for both these applications on Aptivate’s GitHub. Our intention is to agree with our partners to publish full source code wherever possible.

Jeff continues to try and solve the low bandwidth/high latency problems that aid workers face in the field every day and that we encountered in Indonesia. We all know the joy of VSAT networks that slow to a crawl because either some folks on the team are downloading stuff they shouldn’t be downloading or all the computers are infected with bandwidth sucking viruses. It appears Jeff has moved one step closer to sorting out some of the problems surrounding bandwidth optimization by utilizing the Go programming language.

Rather than try and explain to you what Jeff has done I’ll let you read ‘A rate-limiting HTTP proxy in Go‘ and ‘How to control your HTTP transactions in Go‘ and sort out what he is talking about. Hopefully, this post will bait Jeff into leaving a lengthy comment that explains exactly what the hell he is up to.

My understanding is that Jeff is developing two useful tools:

• A web proxy that simulates low bandwidth connections, similar to the Loband Simulator. Jeff’s version is probably more accurate than ours because it doesn’t need to modify the web page, but ours might be easier for non-developers to try out, because you don’t have to install any software.
• A web proxy that can be fed prepackaged content repositories to serve up, so that you can take pre-prepared content (offline websites) with you into the field, and browse them through the proxy as though you were online.

People have been trying to make offlineable websites for a long time. Some of the best examples so far are using entirely client-side (in-browser) technology, such as the Logistics Operational Guide, developed by the World Food Programme for the Logistics Cluster, which can run entirely offline using Google Gears.

Gears had a lot of potential for developers to create offlineable websites, but Google has abandoned its future development in favour of the open standard HTML5, which is not ready yet. So there’s no obvious and future-proof way to develop offlineable websites at the moment. Jeff’s proxy, combined with a spidering system, could be one way to download an entire site, even if it wasn’t designed to be downloaded by the developers.

Another important potential comes from content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. More and more websites are developed using such systems, rather than coded from scratch. The systems know all of the pages on the site, and the links between them, and could easily build an offlineable version of the site for download into Gears, HTML5 or Jeff’s proxy. And one plugin could potentially enable thousands of sites to be offlineable, especially if it was included in the CMS distribution and enabled by default.

A few wikis such as MediaWiki, MoinMoin, DocuWiki and JSPWiki have a programming interface (XML-RPC or WebDAV) that allows a smart client to download pages in their original text format, which could make them more efficient to store offline and also potentially editable offline. Jeff’s proxy could be extended to support sites built in such wikis automatically. There are still some limitations to this approach:

• The pages would not look the same as the online versions, since the styling wouldn’t be downloaded and the effects of CMS plugins would not be visible;
• It would probably still be quite slow to download an entire site this way, by spidering, without server-side support for downloading multiple pages at once;
• Few websites are built out of Wikis, so the potential maximum reach is limited compared to better support for WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Anyway, I wish I knew Go, and had time to hack on Jeff’s proxy tools.

All images are embedded SVG in the XHMTL. No bitmaps at all. Notice how fluid it is, how it scales with the browser’s zoom in and zoom out controls (Control + and Control – in Firefox) and as you resize the browser window.

Screenshot of Sam Ruby's Blog

The page is small, just 14.5k of HTML plus 6.6k of CSS. There’s 21k of JavaScript that isn’t required for the design. Even the drop-down menu at the top works with Javascript disabled. Finally there a WOFF web font that adds 40k (another nice technique). It would be nice to have web fonts hosted for cross-site caching.

One disadvantage of designing sites this way is that the page must be valid XHTML for inline SVG to work. This makes it difficult to support older browsers properly, because the server must send the content-type as text/xhtml+xml, not text/html. This will cause older browsers to download the page instead of rendering it. You could work around that with user agent sniffing. I think that Internet Explorer might need that in any case.

Another disadvantage is that very few CMSs currently support generating valid XHTML, so it’s difficult to know what tool we could recommend to help you to build and manage a website with inline SVG. Massimiliano of the Habari Project says:

I don’t have any examples of blog software constructed this way… the only way to find out how many people would like having SVG on their blog is to provide a blogging tool which allows them to do it.

Both issues could be worked around by using external SVG (in separate files) instead of inline (embedded in XHTML). External SVG files are more cacheable but require additional HTTP requests to fetch from the server the first time.

Most older browsers do not support SVG images, so although the site degrades gracefully, it looks very plain without any graphics. You could work around this with a server-side renderer that converts the SVG to PNG for older browsers.

I think this is an excellent example of a great technique that we could be using for many more sites.

So I was very interested to see a new training workshop being run by the Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The workshop is on Mobile Science: Sensing, Computing and Dissemination and the deadline for applications is tomorrow, July 10th.

Quoting from the announcement:

The Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), with the assistance of the University of Washington (USA) and of the UCLA Centerfor Embedded Networked Sensing (USA) will hold a Workshop on “Mobile Science: Sensing, Computing and Dissemination” in Trieste (Italy) from the 2 to the 5 of November 2010.

Mobile applications offer tremendous benefits to academic research and
education, and to society as a whole throughout the world. This is an
opportunity that deserves attention and promotion, especially in less
developed areas where mobile phones are the first telecommunications
technology in history to have more users than in the developed world.

The specific things that interested me were:

The Mobile Science workshop aims to engage the scientific community in developing countries in the design, development, and deployment of the newest mobile scientific applications;

i.e. advocating appropriate mobile applications in scientific
research/academia;

Participants will learn how to apply mobile technology tools to retrieve scientific data

I.e. designing mobile apps for science data collection;

how to apply appropriate web-based analysis to assimilate mobile data into scientific studies

I.e. web-based statistical analysis and presentation, like a free online version of SPSS? As far as I know this doesn’t exist yet. The closest that I can think of is the Google Docs spreadsheet, which is of course just a spreadsheet, requires an internet connection and doesn’t allow plugins for additional scientific analysis functionality. But there could be a very interesting app to develop here.

and how to share their scientific findings with a potentially large mobile audience.

I.e. low bandwidth design with an emphasis on web standards for cross-platform compatibility, so that it works on the largest number of mobile devices.

If you want to apply, better get on your bike (or modem?) because the deadline is tomorrow. If you want to do mobile scientific research applications, please get in touch, we’d like to help you.

The average size of web pages has been growing much faster than the average speed of connections in developing countries, and journal websites are no exception, as you can see in Alan’s blog post:

Average Page Size vs Bandwidth

As Alan points out, the average journal’s home page in his sample would take over 90 seconds to load on average, for researchers at universities in developing countries. Usability research has shown that people expect a computer to respond within 30 seconds. Making them wait longer interrupts their concentration, causes dissatisfaction and annoyance, and they often abandon the process. The biggest factor in user satisfaction is speed of response.

While this research probably did not include users who are accustomed to slow and unreliable computers, I think it’s safe to say that most people would find it annoying and difficult to use the Internet on a dial-up modem. And even a modem would have been preferable to some of the Internet connections that I’ve experienced (and paid for) in some countries in the last few years.

Academics have little ability to persuade their universities to upgrade their internet connections, at a cost of several peoples’ salaries (several thousand dollars a month). The only people who can change this are the publishers of the journals, by optimising their journals’ websites for users with slower connections.

But how to persuade the publishers that this is important? We built a low bandwidth simulator ourselves, and took it to Oxford, to INASP and the ACU‘s Publishers for Development conference.

What We Did

We set up spare machine as a bandwidth management box, and used it as a network filter for the participants. They could come and plug their laptops into the box, and browse the Internet and their own websites at a simulated slow speed.

Exercise Table

We configured the box for transparent bridging. This allowed us to insert and remove it from the network easily, just by switching over a network cable, to demonstrate the difference between fast and slow loading of pages.

We gave the participants at the meeting tasks to perform on various publishers’ websites, for example finding and downloading an academic paper by topic or researcher.

Playing the Game

I think they found the activities enlightening, because we had some very good comments from some of the participants:

• “We’re so pleased that Alan was able to work his magic at the recent PfD session – his delivery is innovative, dynamic and fact-packed so it really sparks enthusiasm from the audience… [which] is demonstrably channelled into action once people return to their places of work.“
  Publishers for Development Team
• “It was really useful to try the low bandwidth! [Our site] is already considered fast but it made us think even more around this issue, what else can we do etc.“
  Anonymous Participant
• “Alan Jackson’s information about bandwidth was kind of shocking even if I knew it before, but to really experience it was very valuable. We are going to redesign DOAJ’s home page and this must be the starting point.“
  Sonja Brage, DOAJ
• “Site speed is a major consideration for us, and I really enjoyed Alan/Aptivate’s session, experiencing the exasperation of trying (and failing) to connect via low-bandwidth… I have a feeling that there is ‘excess baggage’ on a number of the pages…“
  James Kitchen, OECD

How We Did It

We used FreeBSD as the operating system for the software bridge, because its dummynet traffic shaper is relatively easy to use, and very good at simulating slow connections.

We wanted to use a laptop instead of a desktop machine, so that we could carry it to the conference easily, but we had hardware compatibility issues with FreeBSD on all the laptops we had available to us (mostly IBM Thinkpads). We ended up using a compact Fujitsu desktop box.

We installed FreeBSD 8 on it, and configured it to transparently bridge between two interfaces. Our internet access at the conference would be wireless, but we had issues with bridging wired and wireless interfaces together. So instead we used a Linksys WRT-54GL router with the Tomato firmware, which enables wireless client mode, to connect to the network:

Throttler Network Diagram

And this is what it looked like in the room. Notice the essential coffee and cupcake, without which the system mysteriously failed to work:

Network Close Up

We configured the FreeBSD box to bring up the bridge automatically at boot time, and to load a set of ipfw firewall rules to enable dummynet, the traffic shaper. On this box, the ethernet interfaces are called em0 and rl0, so we added the following lines to /etc/rc.conf:

ifconfig_em0="up"
ifconfig_rl0="up"
cloned_interfaces="bridge0"
ifconfig_bridge0="addm em0 addm rl0 up dhcp"

firewall_enable="YES"
firewall_type="/etc/ipfw.rules"
dummynet_enable="YES"

Then we created /etc/ipfw.rules with the following contents:

# with bridge mode, two nics. em0 is wan
add pipe 1 all from any to any out recv em0
add pipe 2 all from any to any out xmit em0
add allow all from any to any
pipe 1 config delay 700ms bw 40Kbit/s mask dst-ip 0x000000ff
pipe 2 config delay 700ms bw 40Kbit/s mask src-ip 0x000000ff

This configuration creates two dummynet pipes. Pipe 1 is for traffic received on the external interface (downloads), and pipe 2 is for traffic being sent out of the external interface (uploads). We have to follow this by a rule which allows all other traffic, otherwise local traffic (on the box itself) is denied by default when the firewall is enabled, which breaks local DNS and inbound SSH and makes the box pretty unusable on the console.

Then we configure both pipes to allocate 40 Kbps (kilobits per second) for each individual IP address in the private subnet (allocated by the DHCP server on the Tomato router) and a 700 ms delay in each direction, which gives a 1400 ms round trip time. This is somewhat higher than the expected 600 ms round trip for a connection by geostationary satellite.

The end result is that each user connects a laptop to the switch behind the box, gets an IP address from the DHCP server on the router, is NATted by the router onto the public network, and is able to browse the Internet with a connection of 40 kbps upload and download. If you remove the FreeBSD box, by connecting the switch directly to the router, you can access the public network at full speed.

One issue was that the public network used a captive portal, which we had to log into. We didn’t want each client on our network to have to log in separately, so we enabled NAT on the router, and in wireless client mode, all the NATted clients get the MAC address of the router, so the public network thinks that they’re all the same PC and doesn’t ask them to log in again.

Why We Did it

We think that members of universities and research institutions need to be able to join and participate in the global research community as equals, in order to play their part in assisting development in their home countries.

Programmes such as PERii, HINARI and AGORA negotiate free or discounted online access to these journals for universities in developing countries. But the users still need to get online and access the content.

Online publishing for Western markets is usually designed for users with fast Internet connections, which Western universities have. But in other regions, universities often can’t afford fast connections, and this makes it very difficult for them to access these journals online.

Publishers for Development is bringing international publishers together who are interested in finding out how they might contribute to discourse and action around developing country access, encourage publication from developing country researchers and understand the diversity within research cultures/communities and the challenges these present.

I think that censorship is useful when it serves a higher purpose, for example to save lives, or to save vital money for underfunded universities in countries where bandwidth is expensive and there are alternative ways for students to access the uncensored Internet for private browsing purposes. I’m opposed to censorship that requires leaving the country or changing your ISP to get around it.

Walubengo wrote on the BMO Training mailing list:

Am just from the student labs and came across this sneaky little [software]:

http://www.ninjacloak.com/

It basically allows my students to get behind the good old
dansguardian/squid proxy_firewall; essentially allowing them to visit
and download all and sundry (read porn, warez, torrents et al)

[H]ave been wondering why the clamour to “open-up” the internet “for
research” had gone down (now I know).

Any quick counters? (beyond just blocking ninjacloak.com, since they are likely to get an equivalent sooner rather than later)

I have never used ninjacloak and I don’t intend to, but I’m sure that if you post some logs of its use from your proxy server, we can figure out how to block it.

However, no security is perfect. There will always be ways around any security measure that we implement. However, no workaround is perfect either. Once we understand how it works, e.g. what the requests that it makes look like, we can block it.

This quickly turns into an arms race between the user and the administrator. The winner is usually the one with the most time, patience and determination. This may be a fight that you don’t want to take on.

In my view, if users really really want to access some blocked content, they will find a way. However, a good security system will make it possible to at least trace that they did so, if not exactly what they accessed. So my approach would be two-fold:

1. Tackle the biggest problems first, and when they make sense. If someone uses ninjacloak to view a porn site once, it is hardly going to bring down your network, so you don’t need to care. If all your students are using TOR, AND it is bringing down your network, THEN it’s time to do something about it. If you don’t know what the biggest problem is, find out.
2. Don’t forget that social measures are far more effective than technical ones. If students know that they are being watched, they are much less likely to try things like this. Make REALLY sure that everyone knows and understands your policy. When you find students bypassing your security, go and talk to them. If necessary, consider the use of formal sanctions, which are likely to have a stronger deterrent effect.

If users think they are being treated unfairly or harshly, it can increase their determination to fight the system. If you have a good reason for censoring, because you can show them how much damage their actions are causing to legitimate or intended uses (such as academic research), they are much more likely to understand and comply with your requests, hopefully avoiding the need for sanctions.

nb: but again, someone may ask, why not just open up the internet any way?

Because (and only when) it wastes your precious bandwidth that’s better used for your core purpose (e.g. academic research), which is why you pay for the connection in the first place.

Management of Internet connections is a big subject. Whole books have been written about it, including the freely downloadable How To Accelerate Your Internet (BMO Book). However, for anyone who doesn’t have time to read it, I will briefly summarise the most important points that I can think of:

• have a clear, simple and strict Internet access policy, and enforce
  it.
• have enough bandwidth, AT LEAST 3 kbps per computer, uncontended. So if you have 1000 computers, you should have 3 MBits dedicated bandwidth, or 60 MBps if it’s shared or contended with a 20:1 contention ratio (typical ISPs).
• have competent network administrators. If you don’t have them, then hire or train them.
• implement good network management practices, e.g. by following the advice of the BMO Book.
• start by solving the problems that users complain most about, to give them the best possible service.
• monitor your network to understand how Internet bandwidth is being used.
• block misuses of Internet access that are causing problems for legitimate use of the Internet connection.
• ensure that client PCs have good, fast antivirus, perform well, are
  regularly reformatted and reimaged, and have strong local security to prevent unauthorized software installation.

Far more information on all of these topics can be found in the BMO book. I suggest starting with the Introduction if you’re interested.