Skip to Main Content View Text-Only

The City of Portland, Oregon

Office of Management & Finance

Bureau of Technology Services

BTS HelpDesk: 503-823-5199

1120 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 1111, Portland, OR 97204

Web Filtering Enhancements

By Brian Ventura

With the current environment on the Internet today, the most dangerous things we do online is read our email and connect to websites.

Why is email and web surfing dangerous?

 - Because we are trusting arbitrary sites that we may know nothing about.

Now some of the sites we go to are known to us, however we often search for a subject and may connect to an unknown site. For email, these messages often come from unknown senders. In both web and email, the content may contain malware or try and trick us to provide sensitive information.

The City of Portland Bureau of Technology Services (BTS) has solutions to protect worker's computers and web filtering is one of those solutions. We are actively increasing functionality to ensure we protect from the latest issues and attacks. Due to our continued adjustment, you may experience issues with some websites and browsers.

Known issues:

  • Firefox and other non-supported browsers need a configuration change. Here are instructions for Firefox: <firefox link>
  • Other software that uses the web may experience problems. These are most commonly programming interfaces that have internal web trust configurations. These configurations need to include the City devices. The Firefox browser fix above must be applied to these software programs. We do not have specific language for each software program, however the concept is the same: Import the City's certificate to the software's certificate trust as an authorized root.