Paul contacted systems regarding Celia’s question about accessing websites/licensed resources from the guest access stations and got the following info…
Here is some clarification on access restrictions from Heman in Systems:
Whether a site should be blocked at our guest stations are determined by a combination of 3 rules:
Rule #1: Explicitly or implicitly trusted site are given access
Example: “ubc.ca” is explicitly trusted. Which means any site that ends
with “ubc.ca” will be allowed access, including “parking.ubc.ca”
Rule #2: Sites linked from an implicitly trusted site are also given access
“library.ubc.ca” is implicitly trusted, which means if “library.ubc.ca” website
contained a link to a third-party site, that third-party site will also be trusted;
NOTE: this third-party is only explicitly trusted, in other words, links from this
third-party site will be blocked.
Rule #3: Sites that appeared on our “blacklist” will always be blocked
Example: Google, Hotmail: since they are on our “blacklist”, access will be
blocked even if there is a link from “library.ubc.ca” to it.
Most of the time, problem occurs when a site that we otherwise trusted uses another web hosting company to host their content. For example we trust “parking.ubc.ca”, however they use a company called “eigendev.com” to process their credit card transactions, so, unless we manually add “eigendev.com” into our list of explicitly trusted sites, our guests will have trouble paying their parking fees: things will fail halfway thru their credit card transaction.
Similarly, problem occurs when our database provider passes control to a different website when delivering their contents, example if “naxosmusiclibrary.com” hosts their stuff in “naxos.com”, their content will be blocked unless [1] music library also has a link to “naxos.com”, or [2] we manually add “naxos.com” to our list of trusted sites.
Since we are short staffed, we don’t want to be maintaining these trusts and blacklists all the time. If patrons have problems accessing our more *popular* journals or databases, let us know, and we will attempt to trace out the third-party site and add them to our trusted list; otherwise the unauthenticated guest workstations are provided “as is”, and guests are encouraged to register for an ID/password if they want to do any serious research etc.