Otherwise known as a bug.
Turns out that Covenant Eyes, which as I’ve said before is quite a good system, can screw you around a bit.
What it does is log everything you access online to an account on the CE servers. Problem is, if it can’t access the CE mothership to log in, then your internet access is locked down.
Today, it seems that the Covenant Eyes server went down for a while, confirmed by checking on another CE-free computer. Everything on my end was fine – I could even ping google.com – but because Covenant Eyes couldn’t phone home it locked everything up, then proceeded to crash.
Problem was, I had a whole mass of work from UNSW to do at the time. And much of it required internet access.
No, really. Properly required, not ‘I just need to look up smh.com’. Papers, online apps, email correspondence, that sort of thing.
And I couldn’t do anything. I just got a hung system, and then (much) later a zillion pop-ups, all of which need to be clicked on individually, telling me something I already know by looking at the little closed eye icon in the menu bar.
(Open eye, working internet. Shut eye, tubes are closed.)
Surely this is not great behaviour on the part of Covenant Eyes. If the system can’t access home base, can’t it just write to a local file and then sync later on?
In fact, why isn’t this the default behaviour?
The question that needs to be answered is: Will it reduce the security/effectiveness of the CE system.
Without having full knowledge of what can/can’t be done, it would seem to me an encrypted file, in an appropriate protected location, would make it as hard to fool as actually deleting the application.
Mike
Let em say how sorry I am that there was an outage with our servers. Our VP of Technology wrote a blog post about this:
http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2009/01/28/planning-to-fail/
If there is ever a problem again, please call us at 877-479-1119 and we will turn your filter off so you can at least access your Internet. Please accept our apologies for inconveniencing your work time.
Luke Gilkerson
Internet Community Manager
Covenant Eyes
Hi Luke
I’m impressed you replied to this blog – well done.
Would you care to comment on the technical (or commercial) feasibility of logging the sites locally if something goes wrong networkwise?
Fish Piper is Australian (as am I) – and because of the time difference and international phone call, contacting you guys can be quite hard for us – especially when it is time critical. I’m a big fan of CE – but have had a friends computer cut from the internet for several days whilst playing international phone tag with you guys. That’s just a part of life when dealing internationally without a 24/7 support crew.
Mike
Thanks for your comment Luke.
Looks like my problem was different to the blog post (going down at about 5pm Eastern Australian time, GMT+10h). Mike’s right in that telephone support from the other side of the world is difficult at best.
I echo Mike’s question – is a local logging system at all possible (encrypted, of course)? Given that you have users from all around the world, and *you can’t turn the thing off when it fails*, are there other options for the future?
Sam.
Good response, Luke.
Thanks.