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180 Comments
- ALLCAPS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41Think about it - One administrator vs 1000 kids with time on their hands and the whole Internet for a reference library.
If the administrators think their networks going to stay safe for long, they're idiots. - rstarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.
Oh god, I love it when people are so out of touch with pop-culture name things "hot new trends" as soon as it's happened more then once. They make it sound like they're buying yellow rubber bracelet's with IP's all over them. - 8bitclassics, on 10/12/2007, -4/+26Being the bad guy (district technology administrator), some things to remember. First, not all schools use the same filter or the same settings for blocking. Proxy sites will most likely be blocked because of the allowance to go to almost any site. With good filters, you have the option to block unknown IP addresses which we do. This will block people setting up SSH proxy's on their home computer. You have to use standard port 80 for the most part as all other ports will be blocked by the firewall. Also, the Filter software will track that IP address and the Admin can find out who owns it. If he finds it as a local ISP/Phone company, they do have them assigned by area, so easy to find.
It is funny, with all the school's trying to block these sites, students create sites with lists, well when Admin's find these sites, they just forward them to the filter company and watch the site for updates. So usually within a day, they will then be blocked. Myself, I have forwarded a few of these and blocked a bunch myself. I also have been watching to top sites students go to which will always point to any of these or other innappopriate content. I just go through the list at the end of the day, check on unrecognized sites and categorize them if needed.
One thing students forget is that the district is liable for ALL activity on their Internet connection. If a student is abducted because of somebody on MySpace is stalking them, the district could be liable because of this. It is also required by State and Federal law to block these sites. So don't go blaming the Tech person. The school board makes the decision on what is blocked. If they enable these filters, they receive additional state/federal funds because of this. The district also pays expensive Internet costs, and blocking inappropriate content which most everybody wants reduces that bill. I feel in the University where people pay to go to school, they shouldn't block as you are paying for that connection out of pocket.
I was a hacker when I was in school (how many years ago). We didn't have Internet or a network for that matter. We mostly programmed. I understand it gets boring for students (I get bored at work), but I am paid to do this. I just kicked a Technology club student off the Internet for a week because he was actively searching for them. Next one will be a month, then a year. Most schools have an acceptable use policy (students don't read them, they just sing and turn in). If you need to get to these sites, do it at home. - snlildude87, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22poo on the last paragraph of the article.
well, i can honestly say that most of what the article says is true. i'm a webmaster, and most of my visitors view my site from school (only dedicated visitors view my site from home, or about 67%). if my site gets blocked, someone will email me, and i'll make a mirror to my site. after about a week, that mirror gets blocked, and i create more mirrors. - dallen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23doesn't care. Kids these days... :-)
- Uruviel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20SSH tunnel.
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20Yup, nothing like having the kids read a 15 page TOS before doing a google search.
The next thing you know, kids will have to bring their lawyer into school with them on the first day. - blankman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18The sad part is, these are the same people who think they can teach computers to these kids while its actually the other way around.
- Antz0rz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16....I just finished setting one of these up so I can read digg at school. :|
- cr3ative, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17I expect it was a violation of the TOS for the network.
He deserved it. - akilleen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Or SSH tunnel over HTTP(S) tunnel.
http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling/ - tapo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Personally, I use Tor (tor.eff.org), out of fear that my school will try and block my server's IP.
The great thing about Tor is that if the sysadmin tries to damage your circuit by blocking some IPs, you will be up again in a matter of seconds when Tor simply finds more users to connect to. - metalrock76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I love how my school blocks "Gmail.com" but not "mail.google.com"
- zweben, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Back in high school it was a pretty simple matter to get around the web blockers. It was amazing to see otherwise tech-illeterate people using proxies and caches and other various methods just so they could get to myspace and some flash games.
I really like the tech coordinator's additude though:
"I eventually tracked down the (Internet Protocol) address, so that it doesn't work for him anymore," said Don Wolff, tech coordinator in the Phoenix-Talent School District, adding that Ryan didn't face disciplinary action. "It's against our acceptable-use policy, but he's not going to quit trying, (and this way) we can keep learning."
Most people would suspend the kid and get nothing out of it. This guy knows better and I commend him for it. - MateyO, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Not so. The administrator has 'deny any any' as a last resort. The kids may have the strength of numbers, but the IT guys aren't completely powerless.
- diotro, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
Whether it's proxies, or actual telnet brute force, the internet should be free; never restricted. - Darkhacker, on 10/12/2007, -10/+21Me and a group of my geeky friends have been using proxies for YEARS! We still haven't been caught, although we are now starting to worry that we may get shut down. Not because of this article or because of what is happening at other schools, but because the idiots at my own school can't keep their mouths shut. For all these years, the select few of us were the only ones who knew about this. Not another soul even knew what a proxy was at my school! One day we were caught by a student. The student saw us surfing a blocked site and they go "hey! isnt that site blocked... how did you do that?!!". We tried to explain it in a way that wouldn't give us up, but somehow the word proxy slipped out of one of our lips. Now its the "cool word" to say. Stupid jocks that can barely use a mouse or a keyboard are running around bragging about how they hax0red using a proxy. It's really annoying having people that don't even know what a proxy is who think they are being cool by saying it as much as humanly possible.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12*sigh* Here goes... I go to a pretty big high school. About 1500 kids. We have a principle, three vices, and an athletic director who is like a stand-in. There are a few district adminsistrators, but they don't actually work at the high school. The school network connects the high school, the middle school, and the intermediate school (the giant elementary school, brand new). There is also the "district office". Most of the high level people work at the intermediate or the district office. I think the only network admin in our building is the librarian, who is also the webmaster. I won't divulge into the bad things I have to say about her :)
Moving on, we've got an active win2k3 server I believe at the district office. It controls all of the logons and whatnot. At the highschool itself, there are probably 5 client-level admin logons. In other words, they have full admin access to any computer they log on to. As the premiere tech student in the school, I happen to have access to one of these admin logons. I never use it maliciously, end of story.
Our school has a heavy WebSense filter. Everyone hates websense, and hates our district office for deploying it. My teacher who I study under is even forced to comply with WebSense. Websense has no reasoning, and that's why it is so dispicable. For years now, students have been using proxies to get to dumb websites. The last time I used a proxy regularly was freshman year - I used it to goof around, go to game sites, use AIM express etc. This was nothing new. Eventually they found the proxy and banned it, so we'd find a new one for a few weeks, then ban... so on and so forth.
Students in the computer labs are always informed that the district office is watching them. If not the district office, the teacher can view all of their computers from their own computer at the front of the room, using a tool known as NetSupport. As an understudy, I have experience using netsupport. Again, I've never used it maliciously, nor have I ever upheld false justice by locking screens because someone was doing something innapropriate. I've figured out that the best way to deter NetSupport is to just rip out the ethernet cable... or using a process explorer, kill the program running it.
The last major computer "incident" was several years ago, when the previous leading tech student decided to install some keyloggers :-) Now, he was a cool guy, but pretty rebellious at heart. I forget the punishment they gave him ... but moving on, despite all of this high-tech security, no one has been persecuted. I know for a fact that almost every student violates the TOS every time they log on to a computer in the school. They violate it left and right. Yet with all this technology, no one catches them or stops them. Perhaps it's better for the administration to learn?
It's interesting to note that I was infact "written up" for a computer violation, but it was not discovered with all of our tech resources. In economics we had a discussion about flash drives, so on the laptops we were using, I decided to browse NewEgg. Needless to say, the teacher was having that "special time" that she has, I guess, and I was scolded for being off task for "like the third time" and appropriately written up to the office. I had a little talk with one of the vice principals about what I did. He informed me that any more "violations" could disturb the balance of my computer use policy, or something in the way of that. I assured him nothing malicious was done, and he seemed to understand that. Then he said, "Well, it looks like the only fair thing here is to have you spend an hour after school."
So for alllllllllll of the things I've done that are probably "worse" than this, and allllllllllll of the malicious things other students do, and allllllllllllll of the technology that keeps track of us and the fact that we are allllllllll constantly assured we're being watched, it took three years and a teacher having a bad day to actually look at my screen and write me up, not because I was in fact violating the use policy, but because I wasn't doing my work and I was wasting oh-so-precious class time, to have actually violated the computer policy.
In conclusion, I served out my detention with no remorse. All I did was spend an hour re-organizing my folders. It was nice and quiet. There were probably about 5-6 rowdy kids in the back that the teacher had to keep yelling at to shut up and not fall asleep. I was the only person doing anything constructively. To make things worse, the teacher was the librarian. We had a short conversation about the school's equipment they were auctioning off. The irony.
The bittersweet part was when I finished the project in under an hour that night, and ended up staying awake just to help other kids finish the project - the same kids who slacked off in class. - aeiou, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12When I was in school I seem to remember that you could do a little dos attack on the filter by just reloading the site really quickly for a while. Eventually it would let you through.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12My friend and I have been doing this since last year already. He made a home proxy, and I spread the word to almost the entire school. Although slow, it does the job right. The entire school knows about it and has been using it at school like crazy.
Recently, we got caught for various computer activies so they r monitoring our computer use. He's the one is deep trouble though. He is convicted of an attempted hack to the school and already had 10 days of out-of-school suspension. He is currently banned from and computer on the school network and also the school website. He will be having another meeting later to decide if he will be expelled from the school or not! ISN"T THIS CRAZY!!! My friends and I rallied up a protest and for an entire day, the whole 8th grade (it's a big school too) wore shirts with the words "FREE MOOSE" on it(his nickname is moose). I even made aim icons (http://xec.xanga.com/7cbb6646c2d3242616367/t28931987.gif and http://xa1.xanga.com/5b0b74765973342594822/t28920678.gif).
If you're interested in this event, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, or Skype me at mastaxpeng. There's too much to type here. - BugMeNot2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10The school I went to last year has the best TOS (it's pinned up to the wall).
It says something along the lines of...
1. DO NOT Download ANYTHING
(how are we supposed to surf the Internet without downloading anything, huh? Y'know, you have to fetch the HTML, CSS, and image files to view a website.)
2. DO NOT Save ANYTHING to the hard drive (save it onto floppy disks!)
(errr... okay... then what's the point of having 80GB hard drives?)
3. DO NOT Shut Down the Computer!
(k.)
4. DO NOT Visit Inappropriate Sites!
(they don't have web filters)
5. DO NOT Download Viruses!
(lol. ok.) - Toloran, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Bypassing the filter was my (and several other peoples) favorite game back in highschool. There was a browser game called O-Game (www.ogame.org) that alot of people played. It eventally got to be so distracting (playing ogame when you were supposed to be working on your essay) that they blocked the website. After about 24 hours, we startted connecting to ogame118.com which lead to the same place. They eventually blocked that too. Then we created a free .tk address for it and connected to it that way. After a few rounds of that they blocked the whole .tk domain (nothing of value there anyway).
All that and we hadn't even gotten around to using proxy servers. How they eventualy stopped us (in the tech classes, not normal classes) was by installing software on the computers that allow the teacher to see all the programs you have running at any one time (it also keeps a log). It also allowed them to see what their screen looks like at any one time. It was fairly effective.
Conclusion of this story: They added WiFi all over the school and you could just use you Laptop to access the site.
Moral of this story: Empires have been defeated at the hands of a few bored high school students. - Mexrocker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9one of teachers is actually making deals with kids. Give him a few proxies for him to block, get a few extra points on that report card grade. I learned my lesson from telling people about proxies, always let them look for them on their own, people can't keep their mouths shut.
- rvalles, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13It's too sad that they apply censorship in the first place. I'm worried how many years will it take for people to understand censorship is bad, and if it will ever happen. If there's something we need to protect the kids against, it's overprotective fathers/teachers/etc. How will our kid learn, without exposure?
- radda, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Ahhh, reminds me of the good ole days. Jay, if you're reading this, your proxy saved me many hours of actually paying attention in Networking.
- ateam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7It's kind of strange that this incident got its own article. I did this althroughout middle and high school, as did many other students. I wasn't trying to get on MySpace, rather, sites like Wikipedia that were blocked at my school for some backwards reason. Cool nonetheless, though :-)
Remember...
"When information is outlawed, only outlaws will have information" - Wilson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7When I was in high school a few years ago I always used to VNC to my home PC to do things like check my POP E. Mail and chat on IRC/IM clients. Of course, only on computers where Winguardian wasn't installed (Ctrl Alt Shift Y to check if it was).
Our regional community site (and many other time-wasting sites) wasn't blocked and I'm sure that's still the case as I see hundreds of students from schools around the province on it at various school hours. One time, we did a block on the IP for one of the schools (from the site end) because some kids were creating malicious accounts and a lot of the population of the school complained when they got home.
Not a lot of Newfoundland teenagers are too interested in MySpace, but I'm sure that if the regional site was blocked in schools, students would start proxying around it. - Xeppo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I use a SSH proxy that I set up at home to bypass all the proxies, also. Granted, I don't use it to browse myspace. It's really beneficial at my school, they completely blocked Google images. >.> Long live Privoxy!
- Tomunist, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7All of my school's filtering is taken care of at the county level, so the admins we know aren't even in control of it. The filters often block gmail and yahoo mail, which really frustrates the teachers who use such things as their primary email. You would not believe the number of times teachers have asked me and my friends how to circumvent the web filtering.
It think the situation at my school is best summed up by this little exchange from Dilbert:
Catbert: "I fired everyone who used the Internet for personal stuff. The only wrinkly in that policy is that you and I are the only employees left. And frankly, I use the web for personal stuff too."
Pointy-Haired Boss: "Can you teach me how?" - Nothlit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I always get a good chuckle when I hear about middle/high school kids staging some kind of protest. They always think it's so important, and nobody else really cares. ;-)
- UnixSkunk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I find it interesting that a lot of people think its just that all the kids are smarter. A lot of the time, kids find a way around the web filters by using the one advantage they will ALWAYS have over the faculty. Numbers. For every teacher in the school system, they have....what...30 students per class? 1 adult teacher against 30 fresh, agile, young new brains eager to learn(Not necessarily eager to learn what teachers WANT them to learn) and in the prime of their life. And usually, the school teachers aren't computer literate. Its an entire school system against one, or a few system and network administrators. The odds say students will be winning for a looong time.
- ZeNiTRaM, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I still haven't got any computer-related classes so I can't go to the computer room in my school. But anyway, I once plugged in my old portable computer (that was used to show a Flash for a presentation) on the Ethernet that is in all the classes (yes, we have an RJ-45 on each class, but there isn't any computer). I discovered all the traffic went through a forced HTTP proxy.. next course I'll investigate further. Anyway, the computer teacher (and the website designer) is definetly not passing the webmaster test. The website is a ASP portal (sort-of) where teachers put qualifications and parents can see them with their usernames/passwords. But a quick look on Firefox "View cookies" shown:
connected=yes
connected_parent=yes
connected_teacher=no
connected_director=no
connected_admin=no
connected_uid=
So I think I, a 15yo boy, should start giving away computer classes. Seriously.
No, I didn't do anything on the website. But I think it would be very funny to put connected_director to YES, and find out than the teacher codes worst than me.
Anyway, a quick link that was already seen on Digg, but it's pretty interesting anyway. http://www.econsultant.com/proxylist/index.html - boneill428, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Is it that big of a deal that they block websites at school? You all can't wait until you get home to check your friends' myspace pages? You don't own the computers at school and you don't own that internet connection. The administrators can block whatever sites they please. The same things are going to happen when you all grow up and get a job. They block websites at work too and you will get a much bigger penality for breaking the rules there.
- SidU, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I got in the same kind of trouble in 8th grade for "net send * Message", apparently the whole district was on the same network back then, rather than separate school networks. Though later I convinced the school that it was their fault for not blocking this, I got off with nothing.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5My school foolishly only blocks 'cmd' and not 'command' so through the creation of a couple .bat and .reg files it is possible to do a regedit to make myself a new admin account :) If you wanna try that technique make sure you make a new /userlist DWORD value of [your username].
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Really I think system/network Admins should try a little harder (At school I mean!) It is fun though, I try to see if I can beat my sys admin lol. For example, first day of school for me back in grade nine I obtain admin access to PC's. Day later I show a few friends how to get into DOS using notepad. Eventually they block what I am doing but for me its entertaining, and challenging what I can come up with next. I love it :D
- rico169, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4What most of the respondents done seem to understand is that a school SHOULD be blocking a lot of the garbage that is out there!
1) the PARENTS dont want their kids getting to those sites.
2) As stated above, the district may be legally liable if ANYTHING bad happens (especially in the Land of the Lawyer!)
3) The internet access provided in a school is not put there for entertainment purposes. It is there to aid in education. ANY other use of it is inappropriate and a waste of tax payers dollars and the student time.
For those of you who found ways around the blocks, goodie for you. You ripped yourselves off. Instead of spending your time learning (which is why you are in school in the first place) you manage to mentally masurbate by playing games.
I really don't expect most of you kiddies to understand this. You see what you want to get to and figure that you have the right to do it. You say "We dont want to be protected!" right up until something bad happens then it is "Why didnt you protect us!" - drizek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I was installing ubuntu on one of the school computers and i asked the web design teacher if he could remove the filter on ubuntuforums.org. He said he couldnt, and that the reason why they put the filters there is because they dont want people to become messed up by what they see on the internet(especially on forums) and sue the school for it. I think its more about covering their asses than it is about censorship.
- pronouncable, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4too bad this story isn't about regular people and using proxies in general then, huh.
- fiftycents, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4unfortunately in my school district the domains are filtered out by the network, not on each individual computer. so that doesn't work for me
- sapo916, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Ok fiftycents... that is all random ***** assumption by you, how do you know he isn't 22 or something, would that be old by your standards? I can also show you 5000 people that are better than the 'kids' growing up with Computers (you werent the only ones) that would amaze you more than if he whiped out a 12 inch gold plated ***** in your face. Also just because the administrators for your network are ***** doesnt mean he wont get you in 5 seconds if you got on his network. So please Shut the ***** up with your all knowing crap...
Kids will bypass, administrators will find out from the weaklinks (loudmouths, logs, etccc), Repeat x infinity
In the end its the Kids wasting time, spending wasted hours trying to get on myspace (to do ***** what?) instead of doing their actual work. So here we have Kids not learning and administrators wasting their time, might as well disable the Internet totally or have a no ***** policy.
By the way, I actually am 17 (surprise) and bypass the filters when the ***** ever. HAH - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yeah but you have to keep in mind that out of 1000 kids only a small percentage (9-10%) posses any technical know how whatsoever and out of those kids probably only 20% are actual geeks.
- metalaaron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4well said 8bitclassics.
some could attempt to approach this differently. talk to the admin and offer your service as it is. he/she and the school are a great resource for college scholarships. the same holds true on the college level. a network admin assistant at the high school or college level is FAR more impressive than the dumbass who got suspended.
browsing at work or school can be a major problem if it's not addressed. i think there was one company in england that allowed its employees to browse during their break time(s). i believe they found that increased productivity as well because they were less likely to browse during work time(s)? there are different ways to approach this and it's kind of like parenting. if you just take the kid's toys away, he won't learn and he'll become defiant. if you tell the child why you took them away and coach him/her then the child will learn something. - Tomunist, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5They've got monitoring software on all of our computers too, but all of the teachers are too lazy to check it, so no one cares.
- eklitzke, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4In Linux it's trivial to lock down a computer so that users can't use removable media, and I'd imagine it's not that hard to do in Windows either. A sysadmin can also easily lock the BIOS, so you can' t boot off of removable media either. If you think removable media is a solution, you're kidding yourself.
- pyrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm also involved with providing support to the school administration side of things. I see most of the posters here are students so I'll just make a couple points about why schools are required to do this. Usually it's not about censorship. As 8bitclassics says, it's about liability. It's the school's obligation to provide a safe learning environment for the students. The school is accountable to school policy and the parents. Kids surfing pr0n directly contravenes the schools sexual harassment policies.
The fact is, we *know* the more resourceful kids are proxying through the filters. We recognize its a lost battle trying to hunt proxies. We take a First Rule of Fight Club approach to it. However, at the end of the day, we've mitigated our liability by taking measures to protect the general student body. My advice if you're going to bypass school filters is to keep quiet about it. Don't tell your dumbass jock friends how to do it. Once it becomes widespread, then it becomes an administrative problem and the result is a crackdown. - Takteek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm sad... At my school the admins were smart enough to change the default password for Lightspeed Admin access.
- Seng, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Two more words: Taxpayer money. You're there to learn, not ***** off on myspace!
- Klarth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Mine goes a little like this:
THE FOLLOWING ACTIONS ARE FORBIDDEN:
1. Programming. (Right, because setting up a development environment is evil and thoroughly harmful to the computer. Also, "programming" is a pretty damn wide spectrum.)
2. The playing of games of any description. (When you don't have any work left, what are you to do? More work!)
3. Communication over the internet. (I'm mystified at this one.)
4. Electronic mail. (This, too.)
5. Installation of viruses. (I'm not even gonna fathom who thought this one up.)
6. Using printers as photocopiers. (...How?)
7. The use of disck's [sic] contaminated with a virus (I carry one of these around me all day)
8. AND FINALLY, DOWNLOADING IS FORBIDDEN! (No internet! Internet bad!)
They used to filter out Wikipedia, for *****'s sake - Then one day they blocked Google (and a few other major search engines) and told people to use the school library to find things instead. End result was about 200 of us flooding the IT room at once - rest is history. -
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