Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

I was in Starbucks earlier and saw someone appearing to be viewing something on YouTube that made me uncomfortable if it indeed was what I thought he was looking at.

I mentioned it to the staff as I left but I was curious, could a public wifi system like that record URLs on YouTube so you could find out what someone was viewing?

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

I would have thought they would have websense or some other webfilter installed which would track all internet access.

Whether or not if you reported it to someone they would do anything about it is another matter.

and then there's probably next to nothing they could do about it anyway

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

My son reported classmates watching vile jihadi videos online during breaks. The college said it was not possible, but checked anyway. The logs proved he was right. The police, and other specialist officers were on site the next day.

Arrests followed.

Further checks showed it had been happening for over a year but no-one had bothered checking the logs.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

that's a bit different though isn't it, I'd assume they all log into the computers with their own user name and password, and they will most likely go through a proxy so all traffic will get logged against an account.

I don't know how starbucks does it, if you have to create a log on and account or not, but often these things don't require any real ID checking.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

According to the Starbucks website they're still using Bt OpenZone/Wifi which is under the "Friendly WiFi" scheme, ie: Content filtered.

Problem is that unless they're doing SSL interception (which they certainly won't be) then their filters are limited in what can be blocked.

Unless what was being viewed is illegal then I doubt there would be any mileage in running investigative reports.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

Now that I seem to have some kind of answer I'll now elaborate and move the thread to a more relevant forum area.

At the back of the store is a corridor that leads to the toilets and just in front of where the corridor starts is the last 'single' table and as I was heading off to the toilets there was a guy sitting at that table facing the rest of the place and naturally his laptop was facing him only.

I didn't really pay much attention to him until I came back out of the toilets and noticed he appeared to be watching a YouTube clip of young girls doing gymnastics, it looked like a tournament of some sort.

Now I could be wrong, in the brief glimpse I had as I walked past I could see the females were of Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Filipino appearance and as their women are often small in stature they could have just as easily been smaller adults.....but to me they looked more around 11,12 etc.

The guy seemed like he didn't want to be disturbed as he had earphones plugged in too.

Again I could be adding 2 plus 2 and making 5 but I discreetly mentioned it to the staff just in case there was more to it or was taken further and out of curiosity this is why I was wondering about the router.

Obviously there's nothing illegal in viewing that sort of thing on Youtube but I'm not comfortable with an adult watching it in such a public place and one where people often take their kids.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

I can think of so many legitimate reasons a guy could be watching gymnastics videos, even if the competitors were younger.

I'm kind of amazed that the first reaction is "ABUSER!" Keep him away from my children!

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

In which case you've not read what I posted. I said I was uncomfortable with it. If I thought he was a child abuser I'd have bypassed the staff and rung the police instead.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

I apologise if I've read the wrong thing between the lines. My reaction is because I get frustrated that men (and it is mostly men) can't do the most innocent of things without having people look at them suspiciously. I find it very frustrating.

I feel that if he's not doing anything wrong, why mention it to the staff? Why don't you want him looking at 'that sort of thing' (gymnastics competitions?) around children? I don't see that he's doing any harm at all.

I gotta say when I first read the initial post, I figured he was watching some sort of torture/animal abuse/beheading or some other abhorrent thing that YouTube should (and probably will) take down once reported.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

Respectfully I'll say this again, I've not said I didn't want him watching it. I said I was uncomfortable with it.

And it wasn't just what he was watching, it was also how he was doing it sitting right at the back when there were plenty of other seats but he chose to sit in the one place where the fewest possible people could see what was on his screen, he appeared to be in his late 40s or early 50s watching children doing gymnastics, plus he had earphones in too so nobody couldhear it either, it's just how the whole of it looked. Put it all together and it just doesn't seem right.

As I said to the staff, I'm sorry if I was wrong and I was careful not not accusing him of watching anything specific, I just relayed my concerns to them and made it clear if they saw nothing wrong then I was happy to trust their judgement.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

To the original question: any decent router has logs of the urls it has served up. Whether Starbucks staff can access it will depend on how internet service is provided to customers. I suspect that they probably can't.

Content filtering is normally performed at the domain name level. Filtering services don't normally try to identify and block specific content within otherwise approved websites (like YouTube).

Finally, there are any number of reasons for a customer to choose their seat, use headphones and even to view gymnastics videos. Such behaviour isn't illegal even if in his heart of hearts he is a complete pervert. Unless you see him doing something that really is criminal, you risk embarrassing everyone concerned by expressing your discomfort.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

Again, nobody is saying anything illegal happened (again, if I believed it had then I would ignored the staff and called the police first).

Without sitting on the guy's shoulder and studying his screen I couldn't know for certain what was going. But from the clip I saw it made me uncomfortable, I mentioned it to one of the staff who presumably decided whether I was overreacting or if it was worth keeping an eye on.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

My thought would be the logs would only record that YouTube was visited and not what video urls were viewed as YouTube is SSL by default. I believe this would make the logs unintelligible.

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

Most of the leading quadrant filtering solutions are capable of performing some kind of DPI so the administrator may implement protocol filters and/or content filters to block specific types of file or tunneled protocols for example. There are other safety measures such as sandboxing content before it's delivered to the client but that's probably out of scope for what BT is delivering to Starbucks.

With regards logging that all depends whether the provider is logging the full URL or just the domain hit. Also, as Damien mentioned with regards HTTPS: Unless the client facing gateway is running SSL interception then you won't be logging any http headers from an SSL conversation as they're in the TCP payload which is encrypted.

Apologies if the above is a bit over-nerdy :)

Re: Recording what was viewed on YouTube
 

What does the client facing gateway do? I am trying to work out a way it can hijack the users' SSL communication with the server.