FYI We’re installing a new firewall appliance for testing starting today in the building. This is in order to make some decisions regarding our future network configurations to be adaptable for whatever may be needed for 21st Century Learning. We may have some bumps along the way.
Please note that the appliance can look deeply into traffic that is being sent in and out of the building and be configured to let some types pass through easier than others (ie allow facebook but stop farmville within facebook, or allow streaming video but deny bit torrent traffic for examples). This is in hopes to allow for users to bring their personal devices into buildings but maintain bandwidth for education related purposes.
On the Orwellian Big Brother scale of 10 we understand this device may be an 11. That is something we will be looking at as well. We’re not planning on using this to systematically track everything everyone does online, but we understand the device has those capabilities.