Web Control allows links in Edge but blocks in Chrome.

[AdithyanT]

Hi @ChristopherTB 

Also, I would like to see the actual category of this website. Can you please find out the same from here?

http://trustedsource.org/

The product drop down should be selected with McAfee SiteAdvisor/WebControl.

Please let us know what is the categorization entry you see in the result? This is to verify if the categorization is correct

[ChristopherTB]

I ran through Edge, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Chrome. With current (1 version behind the latest available.), previous (2 versions behind the latest available) and latest available it's coming down to after applying the October update. What any browsers prior to that with the exception of Chrome / Edge, I cannot say since we encourage those to work in in-house apps rather than FireFox and IE.

Internet Explorer & Chrome do not allow the links.

FireFox & Edge allow the links, but in Edge now if I press F5 for a refresh or try to go back it takes me back to the original link and says it's blocked. Until I close the tab and come back to the website.

As for the checking the URL: 

Main website: https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/extension/srp/technical-resources/

Actual Link to information : https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/graphs.pdf 

Both give below

URL Status Categorization Reputation

https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/ ...

Categorized URL

- Education/Reference

Minimal Risk

One thing I noticed now is that the Links we're having issues with are constantly Refreshing with current data (the URL continues to change and count) and is using WayBack Machine to gather information.

The links that do work are just normal PDFs. 

[AdithyanT]

@ChristopherTB 

Interesting and strange results though! One thing I could think of is to probably clear the cache on Edge after closing it and re try accessing the site (it is probably pulling the non refreshed result based on its cache).

Also Can you please check the category of URL as requested in my post above from trustedsource.org ?

It would be really nice to see a screenshot of the same site being accessed on all the different browsers from the same machine (all 4 browser caches cleared).

Sorry about the extra work here, sometimes these cache data does mess around and it is beyond the plugin's purview to clear them off as it would directly impact user experience!

Looking forward to your response!

[ChristopherTB]

Chrome (using wayback machine link)Edge (using wayback machine link.)URL Status Categorization Reputation

https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/ ...

Categorized URL

- Education/Reference

Minimal Risk

That is what trustedsource.org gives me whenever I put in a URL for bae.ncseu.edu/... whether it's a link or the actual webpage 

I've attached the Edge and Chrome ones, I do not use Firefox so I am installing it and our SCCM requires us to do a restart. So once I restart I'll do it on FireFox on my machine rather than hunting down users on their machines.

One thing to go back to is that it's only blocking the WayBack Machine links. In the Edge link after the ID= those long string of numbers are constantly changing / refreshing going up by 1 number each second. If I try to hit back to go back to the main page it will block until I close the tab.

Cache has been deleted on the machine

[AdithyanT]

Hi @ChristopherTB 

Excellent post! I am confused though how wayback (archive.org) comes into picture here. If archive.org is what is used by you to access these pages, then from what I see, Chrome seems to be the one that is working perfectly fine integrated with WebControl (although, ofcourse that does not seem like your desired result as you prefer the site to be allowed if i am not wrong). As I suspected, looks like Edge is not detecting the url until there is a refresh.

However, the correct explanation is possible only if we know how archive.org is exactly being used here. Can you share any sample link and let us know how you are trying to access the sites?

I am sure you already know the solution either way is to allow archive.org. using WebControl. we have to find out who is not working correctly though!

[ChristopherTB]

Having it allowed is nice, but I would only like to do that if I fully understand what I am allowing into our enterprise network. Though, being able to tell them no with a good explanation as to why helps get division heads and CIO's less upset with as to why it will stay blocked. Or why one blocks and the other allows.

How they are accessing it is just by being on the network, opening their preferred browser (in this case Chrome) googling / copy pasting the link and going directly to that website. Scrolling down and clicking the desired links.

The website link is

https://web.archive.org/web/20170705004253/https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/wqg/srp/rural...

Alternatively you can go to:

https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/extension/srp/technical-resources/

[1] Scroll to Piedmont – Rural

[2] "Select Regional Curves/Graphs" or "Tables & Equations"

The other "sections" such as Coastal, Piedmont - Urban etc..all give the same results. I'm just using the Piedmont Rural section since that's also what the user gave as an example. 

[AdithyanT]

Hi @ChristopherTB 

Based on your clear post above, I can 100% confirm that the extension attached to chrome is working absolutely fine! It is the Edge extension that baffles me!

I was able to achieve compliance with my lab settings on both Chrome and EDGE. (By compliance, I meant, it is getting blocked!).

So we need to really investigate why EDGE extension fails to work here. No other answer apart from cache comes to my mind. I would suggest creating a support request. I am sure we did not arrive at any solution, however, atleast we can confirm where the problem is!

[AdithyanT · Accepted solution]

Hi @ChristopherTB 

Also, to answer this very important question:

---

@ChristopherTB wrote:

Having it allowed is nice, but I would only like to do that if I fully understand what I am allowing into our enterprise network. Though, being able to tell them no with a good explanation as to why helps get division heads and CIO's less upset with as to why it will stay blocked. Or why one blocks and the other allows.

---

here is an excerpt from TrustedSource Web Database document:

Web pages that result in anonymous web browsing without the explicit intent to provide such a service.

This category includes URL translators, web-page caching, and other utilities that might function as
anonymizers, but without the express purpose of bypassing filtering software.

This category does not include text translation, because it is different from URL translation. Text translation requires a user to type a word, phrase, or block of text into an input field for translation, not a URL. Text translation is in the Text Translators category.

In fact, you can see in that documentation that archive.org is an example site of this categorization!

I sincerely hope this helps.