Chat Rooms (Policy)

[Mallika Pichumani]

It would be really useful to know (with all the discussion about chat
policy) just what measures (technical and policy-wise) sites use to ban
chat outright. It sounds to me that some sites do this only as a matter of
policy, i.e. putting up signs that say 'no chat' and some sites do this
technically as well (not permitting IRC clients to run etc.). It also
seems to depend on your environment (NT or Win95) whether you can filter
all chat. It seems that filtering software prohibits chat based on URLs;
though you can also ban the IRC ports themselves. But web-based chat is
still an issue - unless you disable java, there seems to be no way to
avoid this, unless you've got some strict firewall set up. Any ideas?
     
--Mallika

"The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change."
                          ~ Eng's Principle ~
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