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www.torrentz.eu no longer blocked

RL

www.torrentz.eu

Last week Sophos Web Appliance had this listed as Tastless and Offensive

This week the Sophos Web Appliance has this listed as Search Engines

From here users can then proceed to browse other torrent websites, and then download torrentz!

It begs the question: Should Sophos Web Appliance have further categories like the competitors products have?

SOPHOS???

:46757


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  • 0

    Further to this... I wanted to block a radio website today. 

    Only to find out that:

    A. The current in-built categories are very basic and are nowhere near as granular as the competitors products - such as WebSense. * 

     

    * Though I was told that Sophos use the same DB as Websense. Clearly not the case, as the categories are far far far more granular in Websense.

     

    B. You can't create your own categories! This is extremely poor to say the very least. 

    C. All I can do was to class the website as high-risk, even though it's not exactly high-risk, or put it under an existing in-built category that is blocked. Not clever.

    So Sophos, the question's still remain:

    1. Why are torrent sites now listed as search engine websites?

    2. What have Sophos planned for improving categories?

    I have posed these questions directly to support, but I didn't get any replys as they skipped past the questions. I believe this forum is just the medium to get some transparancy on the reply please.

    I have to say that the more and more I use this product, the more and more I am swayed to returning to Websense. 

    Thanks,

    John

    :47249
  • 0

    Thanks for your feedback and for your contributions to the forum.

    The URL categorization data on the Web Appliance is drawn from a number of sources. In the past we used the SurfControl database but as this offered a limited breadth of categories, we have introduced some new sources. We are certainly looking at how we can improve the specific list of categories that we offer and the area of torrents, file downloads and content sharing is clearly one that we should look at closely.

    I did particularly want to address your comment about custom categorization on the Web Appliance, though.

    When we looked at the custom category features that other web filters provide, we found they were often not well implemented and tended to create, over time, a complex nightmare for administrators to keep tabs on.

    The Sophos Web Appliance instead provides similar functionality through the use of the Local Site List and URL tags.

    If you want to add URLs with custom designations, you can add them to the Local Site List, give them a tag of your choice (for example 'Torrents') and then you can use that tag to create an additional policy blocking Torrents sites.

    Regards

    Rich

    :47345
  • 0

    Hi Rich, 

    Thanks for getting back so quickly. 

    I think the confusion was that I was told by Sophos support that I could only change the risk category for the site, or place it within a category that had already been blocked. 

    So tags are the way to go eh. Ok, I'll use them from now on when I need to explicitly block a site. 

    However, my opnion is that custom categories would have been easier, but that's just my view. Each to their own. 

    I do hope though that the categorisation is improved, as I don't fancy the idea of manually catrgorising all the torrent sites etc. Perhaps the Cyberoam acquisition will help ;)

    Thanks, 

    John

    :47365
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