Church wifi

[A New Name]

Yesterday I was standing outside our Stake Center waiting to be let in to do a financial audit.

While cooling my heals, I took out my iPhone and was reading the news. I was on a web site called VOX, and there was an accompanying video with the news piece. But instead of the video, there was the official banner for the LDS church. I thought that odd, but then looked at the top of my iPhone and saw that I had connected to the church Wifi.

When I got home later last night, I went to the same web site, and the news video showed up.

Question for all the IT nerds out there: Is it possible for the church wifi system to bypass a specific item on a page (like a video link) and replace it with church related link? That is exactly what happened last night. Has anybody else noticed this?

[Just This Guy]

If one site has embedded elements that are from a different site , it very much could be that you have a page that loads with various elements that are blocked. That's actually fairly common on business level filtering systems. I get that on my work computers fairly regularly.

[oliver_denom]

Question for all the IT nerds out there: Is it possible for the church wifi system to bypass a specific item on a page (like a video link) and replace it with church related link? That is exactly what happened last night. Has anybody else noticed this?

Yes. Web filters can both block websites and re-direct your destination. For example I may tell my filter to block all flash videos and replace them a message screen of my choice, usually informing the user that they've tried to access blocked content. You generally do a replace instead of a straight out block to prevent the page from being covered in errors, or throwing off the formatting.

[A New Name]

So this filtering is done in each church building? Or is there a central place that does it?

[oliver_denom]

So this filtering is done in each church building? Or is there a central place that does it?

It's all centrally managed. Each building builds a VPN tunnel back to headquarters where they manage filtering, access points, and conferencing.