I do worry about the information of this post, but still it is an information. Please do not hold Trap17 accountable.
Haha... I seriously doubt that anyone will hold Trap17 accountable for that, so don't worry. Anyhow, for some reason, the Trap17 forum is blocked at school (but not the Astahost ones), and when we do access Trap17's pages, they are one of those old white pages instead.
I don't know the difference between to two though. Can someone tell me that?
With my beleifs in open computing and my work place being the IT office in a school im torn here... A few years ago at school and college i used to try to bypass security a lot, proxies, using firefox, even making a visual basic browser so i could hide it with a click of a button. So i agree in principal with this info being out there.
However, consider *why* there are blocks here... Here at work we obviously have filters in place and that's because otherwise the kids just play games and go on facebook all the time and as a place of education these kids need to be taught. It's all well and good being on facebook during ICT lessons but what happens when you are at work in an office and someone asks you how to do something in MS Office? Or when you are home alone and need to print something urgently and yet you can work out how to open the document? These things are taught at school and without learning them you will fail at life.
Also i highly doubt this would be effective against most filters. The best methods are... Well to remove or avoid the filters altogether. I wont tell you how, instead let it be a lesson about lessons. Using a HTTPS connection instead of a HTTP one is generally blocked because the filters look at the domain rather than the URL so https://www.trap17.com is simply www.trap17.com as is http://www.trap17.com trap17.com and www.trap17.com and even HTTP encoded URLs have the same domain which is shown in the HTTP headers returned by the server. You cant avoid that... You can change the ones you send out but not what you receive. The only way to avoid that is to bypass the filters completely.
Do that here and you get a 6 week internet ban... (anyway, with a 9am-3pm day if you feel the need to be on facebook and cant wait a few hours to get home frankly you need medical help, not internet access....)
I don't want to turn this into a debate on filtering, but consider the flip side and the problems caused. When I was at school the Internet connection was filtered through a proxy server. This was fine for blocking games websites, social networking sites, etc. However, it also used a keyword filter which caused no end of problems. For example, in History lessons (and in Politics ones) it was necessary for students to research topics such as fascism, the Nazi party and the Hitler youth. All blocked by the filter, which meant people couldn't get on with their work. The same applied to terms dealing with abortion, drug abuse, cloning and the like - all necessary research topics in Philosophy and Ethics class. While the principles of filtering are good, the execution is lousy in every circumstance I have ever seen it used and it therefore becomes necessary to bypass the system at times.
I believe it would work on sites that are being blocked based on a keyword list of content rather than the URL (or at least that worked at my old school) because the proxy server/filtering software wouldn't be able to read the content of the page, and therefore wouldn't be able to filter it.
*CHEERS*
I could not agree with you more!
Well, I'm definitely trying it. I'll see if it works. Some people had a way to making it work, but I don't know how they did it. Anyway, they now have a system of freezing your computer if you log in as "admin", so I don't know how I'm going to hack into it, though people did manage to unblock to filtering system.
The thing is, it's not only Facebook or MSN or Bebo. It's all the other educational websites as well. We were requires to search for flags of the world once, and tell you what, ALL the sites were blocked because they were "uncategorised". Seriously. That is just WAAAY too much. Plus, I don't have anything for Facebook or other sites anyway, as I don't use theri service.
I don't even play games... so seriously, what's the point of the filter?