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Proxy Sites Offer Secret Passage to Myspace 330

Posted by CmdrTaco from the big-shocker dept.
JafSquared writes "As sites like MySpace.com gain popularity in young adults, schools all over are finding that taking measures to keep kids blocked out of these websites is becoming increasingly difficult. As this hype continues, proxy servers such as "Box of Prox" are springing up like wildfire. While system admins furiously work to diminish the strain placed on their school's local networks from sites like MySpace, these proxy sites are enabling easy access to restricted areas. However, schools aren't the only places that are feeling the heat. Proxies have also been becoming a bit of a complication in the workplace. To the more advanced user, the proxy server can become a tool for malicious intent as this article, delivering an anecdote with the termination of an employee, so poignantly details."
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Proxy Sites Offer Secret Passage to Myspace More

Proxy Sites Offer Secret Passage to Myspace

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  • Proxies? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Goaway ( 82658 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:14AM (#15855264) Homepage
    Wow, Slashdot sure is on the CUTTING EDGE of TECHNOLOGY NEWS!

    • Re:Proxies? (Score:5, Informative)

      by onebuttonmouse ( 733011 ) <obm@stocksy.co.uk> on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:29AM (#15855335) Homepage
      This isn't flamebait. Proxies have been a problem for years and years, the advent of web two-point-oh does not have any bearing on the problem.

      • Re:Proxies? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        no but schools network ADmins are certianly pretty incapable of doing their job if they are not using a whitelist instead of a blacklist.

        Have only a list of acceptable sites. when blocked put a link to submit for approval and teachers in the class or room can click on the link they wanted, view that it is not a backdoor to myspace or someplace inappropriate and then click "allow" which add's it to the whitelist.

        simple works great and has near immediate access to sites not on the whitelist.

        Too bad most scho

      • Re:Proxies? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by deblau ( 68023 ) <slashdot.25.flickboy@spamgourmet.com> on Sunday August 06, 2006 @07:13PM (#15856685) Journal
        Or, proxies have been the solution for years and years. Depends on which side of the table you sit.

    • Re:Proxies? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kbox ( 980541 )
      I don't know why hes post has been modded as troll, He has a point.
      No wonder digg is getting more hits than slashdot now.

      What with last weeks post about installing windows, and now this one "informing" us about proxy sites slashdot seem to be posting very trivial things now, Hardlly the cutting edge tech news site it used to be.

      • Re:Proxies? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        slashdot seem to be posting very trivial things now, Hardlly the cutting edge tech news site it used to be.
        I can hardly imagine all the amazing stuff we must be missing out on, so why don't you go ahead and post some cutting edge tech news stories?

    • Re:Proxies? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MoriaOrc ( 822758 )
      I think the point of this article isn't so much that proxy servers are some sort of new, unexpected problem. It's more that people outside the geek community are starting to discover them (and maybe other things that have traditionally been known only to the techy types). I know back when I was in highschool (ugh, makes me sound so old .. graduated a little over 3 years ago), me and a bunch of friends who took just about all the computer-related classes my HS offered used proxies all the time to get past

  • Do we have a war on social networking yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spazntwich ( 208070 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:18AM (#15855279)
    I'm just waiting for more fallacious appeals to emotion in the fight against kids talking to one another.

    Do politicians even consider how ridiculous their arguments are? Why, ghettos have become a haven for drug dealers, prostitutes, and other nerdowells! Do we ban ghettos? No, I believe parents simply teach their kids about the dangers of going there, and before they're old enough to understand that, the parents simply don't allow them to go there.

    It's sad how human ignorance comes back with a vengeance with the emergence of any new technology or tool, without fail.

    • Re:Do we have a war on social networking yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by namityadav ( 989838 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:47AM (#15855405)
      If school admins try to block sites that kids just HAVE to get to, then the kids will find a way to do so (Hint for Kids: Read about SSH / VPN). And once they know that they've found a way to bypass the school security, their curious minds would want them to check if they can now access porn this way too. The point that I am trying to make here is that the more freedom you try to take away, the more you're encouraging them to break the rules. I, for one, am happy that this will make at least a certain percentage of the kids aware of proxies, private networks etc. It's time that those nerds get to have some 'coolness' factor about them.

    • Re:Do we have a war on social networking yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @02:42PM (#15855934)
      before they're old enough to understand that, the parents simply don't allow them to go there.
      Which is exactly what they're trying to do. Stories like this inform parents that establishing those boundaries is harder than they thought.

    • During the middle part of the 20th century, many urban "ghettos" in the US, inhabited mainly by Blacks, were leveled. In some cases they were replaced by public housing. For a very brief time, the public housing was better than what came before, but it rapidly deteriorated.

      Elenor Roosevelt famously advocated for the demolition of illegal alley dwellings in the District of Columbia. At the time, they were cramped, filthy, areas that attracted vermin and were unpleasant to live in. I don't know exactly

    • I work in a High School and we employ web blocking for a number of reasons. For one, parents expect that we limit what the students have access to just like some of them do at home. But secondly, and more importantly we don't have enough computers for everyone to use when they want (our enrollment is about 900) and so anytime a student is updating his myspace or something else not academically related means some other student isn't able to write his papers. Many of our students come from low income families

      • By your comments I would guess that you are in the age group affected. IM or for that matter updating myspace while in school is the equivalent of passing notes which as long as I've been in school wasn't allowed, being a "new technology or tool" has nothing to do with it. I find it hillarious when kids think their rights are being impinged because they can't do whatever they want while at school. Is it so hard to wait until your home to chat with your "friends"?

        When I was in high school, we were allowed to

  • Internet @ School (Score:3, Insightful)

    by toochoos ( 991616 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:18AM (#15855280)
    I wonder why kids have internet access at school. Do someone really want them to have ADHD since childhood? Aren't they supposed to learn something while they sit in waiting to be online back home?
    • It's like breakfast in the cafeteria; it's meant to be a proxy for a good upbringing at home.

      Myself, I probably used the internet to a lot of its potential at school, but only because I blogged from it...
    • Not only that, but the schools pay far too much for internet access, at least here in Tennessee. I know my school (with less than 500 students) pays about $1,200 a month for internet access... and they lock it down as much as they can. Students aren't even supposed to be on the internet. And it's the STATE that says we have to use this internet service-- we don't have the option of using a different company.

      • Re:Internet @ School (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pete6677 ( 681676 )
        That's because the CEO of that service company donates a lot to some senator, therefore state business has to be directed to his company. Nevermind that it takes money from the children's education.

    • What?!?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Belial6 ( 794905 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:55AM (#15855442)
      What does the internet have to do with ADHD? Ohhhh... That's right. Anything we don't like kids doing must cause ADHD.
    • Public schools haven't been fashioned to instruct children facts and how to learn for decades, and things are just culminating to the point where they've stopped pretending to do so.

      No, the order of the day at public schools is social compliance through political correctness. Bad grades aren't handed out, but you are publicly chastized for not doing well (ie, towing the line).

  • welcome to 1995? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:18AM (#15855281)
    How is this news? People have been using proxies forever to get around blocks.

    • Re:welcome to 1995? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:26AM (#15855318)
      better news would have been to mention anonet [anonet.org] since its vpn based it can transverse 99% of firewalls, not for malicious activity but to stop network admins spying on what you do, with the ability to use with randomly assigned ip addresses its also a great way to connect home to work securly.

      • Re:welcome to 1995? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ecks ( 52930 )

        The case, of hiding your web travels while at work, was mentioned in this article [pcworld.com] which was cited in the post.

        I recently had an employee, an MIS employee at that, fired. He was using Anonymizer at work. We have a tracking system (Web Inspector) and I kept noticing that he was leaving no tracks.
        I consulted with my supervisor and he decided that I should analyze the employee's system. I found footprints, hacking, and a batch file he...

        You'll note that, though the company did find out where their fire

    • There's basically three ways to solve internet in schools. The first way (which my high school did) is the lamest and doesn't work. Proxy servers that look for keywords and stop people from going to certain websites. However, these are completely ineffective beceause there are always sites which can get by the filter (website proxy, google cache, etc, etc). The second way is to block everything except 20-30 approved sites. Such as maybe paid encyclopedia sites. The third way is just to let everything in and

  • MySpace.com IS created to get into young adults (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:20AM (#15855292)
    As sites like MySpace.com gain popularity in young adults ...

    The last time I was in a young adult, I know I certainly gained popularity.

  • Needs more attentive blocking. (Score:5, Informative)

    by celardore ( 844933 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:26AM (#15855316)
    It is possible to filter out these sites with a little more work. For example, my company blocks any url that contains 'proxy'. It also filters most proxy sites that you can find on Google.

    Also, if an admin notices they're getting a load of traffic to say http://surfinsecret.com/index.php?q=d3d3Lm15c3BhY2 UuY29t&hl=1111101001 [surfinsecret.com] then they could just visit that link, see what it was and block away.

    I got around it by installing my own copy of phpproxy on my server and use it infrequently for certain sites. There's a lot of traffic to my domain anyway because I run an application my department uses on there, so it's fairly safe for me.
    • Google IS a proxy.

      http://translate.google.com/translate_t [google.com]

      Enter URL of English language site, translate from Chinese to English, enjoy.

      I remember doing this with Babelfish years ago. Works fantastically well!
      • Another one if your network has ipv6 enabled (yeah I know its unlikely...) is to bounce it through sixxs.net, when its up*

        <offtopic rant>
        gblon01 has been up for a total of 2 days in the last two weeks. If ipv6 is *ever* to be taken seriously then the people providing it need to take it seriously too. As it is it's a f..ing joke.
        </offtopic rant>

    • It is possible to filter out these sites with a little more work. For example, my company blocks any url that contains 'proxy'. It also filters most proxy sites that you can find on Google.

      That's why you should use proxies that have "secret addresses" and run over https. Lets say I choose to make a monthly $5 donation to Überproxy, Inc. Now you just see me connecting to www.abc23foo.net port 443; and the domain changes every 2-3 months.

      That's not a comment on policy though. I know that some p

      • it would make more sense to just talk to people, and spend the time on something else.

        That's exactly what I came here to say... get caught at the workplace once, a reprimand, twice you're fired... it's going to stop. Starting handing out detentions at school and suspensions for repeat offenders and it's going to be equivalent to smoking in the bathroom as far as numbers, certainly not a rampant problem.

        Looks like one of those when all you have is a hammer issues to me.

  • Next it will be SSH tunneling... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by martinultima ( 832468 ) <martinultima@gmail.com> on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:26AM (#15855317) Homepage Journal
    My school district already hates me, just because I was using a VNC connection over an SSH tunnel to work on some stuff at home (yes, this was for a school project). For whatever reason they thought I was trying to access banned sites... funny thing is, I don't even like MySpace. Or any of those sites.

  • A new dawn for the Internet (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The next internet is already being implemented by hobbyists, idealists and realists. There are those who want information to be free, those who want the Big Government(TM) to keep their hands off, those who feel that it's time to take the 'net back. These people are like you and me: they are tired of reading about the latest threats made by the RIAA/MPAA to bend laws to their twisted will. They are tired of knowing that bills introduced by the government to Combat $concept(TM) will be abused by special inte

  • Not really a new problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by onebuttonmouse ( 733011 ) <obm@stocksy.co.uk> on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:27AM (#15855326) Homepage

    When I was in school (5 years ago), schools were trying to block well known proxies, but were unsuccessful at blocking those of us with 'home brewed' proxy servers. This wasn't really such a problem, because the policy was "get caught looking at sites x, y or z and you lose your computer privileges", why does this approach not work with advent myspace et al?

    Proxies aren't such a big deal anyway, I worry more about the possibility of a savvy user with a bootable USB flash drive and OpenVPN.

    • When I was in school (5 years ago), schools were trying to block well known proxies, but were unsuccessful at blocking those of us with 'home brewed' proxy servers. This wasn't really such a problem, because the policy was "get caught looking at sites x, y or z and you lose your computer privileges", why does this approach not work with advent myspace et al?

      Because before the first month of school was over with nearly every student in the school would have lost computer privileges. Kids are so fucking d

  • Strain on networks? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:31AM (#15855345)
    Set up a bandwidth-shaping/QoS-type system that guarantees certain computers (office computers, presentation boxes in classrooms) a certain bandwidth. The other computers can share the scraps from this. In order to prevent hogging of the scraps, also set up a system where the remaining bandwidth is doled out more or less equally to those who need it. With routers running Linux, this should be less difficult than it seems.

    Blocking sites is a half-assed solution since students will always find a way to expend bandwidth. (Personally, I think that the 'net doesn't need to be in classrooms anyway. I went to HS from 1993 to 1997 and survived just fine without going online in school.)

    -b.

    • (Personally, I think that the 'net doesn't need to be in classrooms anyway. I went to HS from 1993 to 1997 and survived just fine without going online in school.)

      Oh, please.

      I personally can't see why anyone should have internet access. It seems like people living prior to 1990 did just fine without. People also did fine without books before Guthenberg came along.

      Yeah yeah yeah, I'll get off your damn lawn now, old man.
      • I personally can't see why anyone should have internet access. It seems like people living prior to 1990 did just fine without. People also did fine without books before Guthenberg came along.

        In classrooms. Used by the students during classes. I have no problem with schools having computers in the library to be used for research, or laptops being given to students to work on papers at home, or (of course) CS courses...

        -b.

      • Yeah yeah yeah, I'll get off your damn lawn now, old man.

        Sorry to reply twice, but the emphasis on "wired schools/workplaces/foo" in the US is a pet gripe of mine. Don't get me wrong; I'm making fuck-you money off of this phenomenon right now, but people have to realize that "technology" doesn't only mean computers. If a school spends, say $200,000 on a shiny new network, IT consulting, M$ software, and computers, it detracts from other things the school could be spending money on. Like hiring the most

        • I don't disagree with you on that, but that just wasn't what you stated in your original post.
          • I don't disagree with you on that, but that just wasn't what you stated in your original post.

            I stated that the:
            ...'net doesn't need to be in classrooms...
            "Classrooms" was meant literally, not referring to libraries, computer labs, etc - I think that the 'net makes a great research tool, but it's use does not have to be ubiquitous in schools, and it being ubiquitous might actually detract from the education aspect. Maybe one computer hooked up to a projector per classroom with no laptop use generally a

    • (Personally, I think that the 'net doesn't need to be in classrooms anyway. I went to HS from 1993 to 1997 and survived just fine without going online in school.)

      You mentioned that you didn't go online in school. What about at home? I graduated from high school in 1996 and the internet, in addition to some local BBS', were a great source of information and... TERM PAPERS. Sites like Altavista made doing research a breeze. While the rest of my peers were in the libraries and at the universities, I was a

      • Why would you implicitly deny access to the internet to students with a statement like the one you made?

        I'm not. I'm implying that there's a time and place for 'net use, and that's not (always) in the classroom. The library, computer courses, at home for research, but we don't need more distractions in class. (And a *good* teacher will keep the class's attention.)

        -b.

  • Restrictions are evolutionary pressure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:32AM (#15855347) Homepage Journal
    The average kid in school, thinks proxies and mucking around with computer stuff are the realm of nerds, sitting in their parents' basement typing away, creating a pathetic online world to compensate for the real one upstairs.

    But the moment, you introduce blockades to access to a "cool" thing like myspace or facebook, these talents become valuable in terms of utilization. More kids learn these, use these and try to out-do the other in terms of l33tness. If there aren't the artificial boundaries drawn by the authorities, these skills would have never been learnt, developed and hopefully put to good use in the future.

    Whatever they block these with, they just raise the bar for the kids. Clever, curious and with the power of the rest of the internet behind them ... there's nothing that's totally blocked off. Probably threats to those who break the security and offer real world punishments maybe, but blocking it all is impractical. Of course, then there are those who prefer forbidden fruit to the ones in the fridge, for the momentary thrill of breaking some rules.

    I remember breaking the proxy at a college where I was giving a talk. All I did was ssh -D 8080 into my box and bypassed the "security" of the campus network. But I did that by unplugging the monitor cable, running ssh and plugging the monitor back on in under 2 minutes.And lo, meebo.com suddenly worked. The kids thought I was some great genius or something. THat kind of ego-rush to a 17 year old teenager can drive them to do far more than just break firewalls to get kudos from their peers.

    These kind of restrictions just favour the kids who learn to use the system, instead of just fighting it on the streets like the average politico.

  • I used to run one of these. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jb.hl.com ( 782137 ) <joe.joe-baldwin@net> on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:35AM (#15855362) Homepage Journal
    For the purposes of myself (who at first just wanted to play sudoku at WebSudoku...) and others in my class at college (who wanted MySpace) I set up a CGIproxy on my webspace. A few months later, it had to be removed; for a start, because even when password-protected, the thing sucked up about 50% of the CPU time on the (shared) server on which it was located. In the end me and my classmates were a minority, it was mostly others using it (I did get a very nice email from a US Marine in Iraq asking for the password... I wasn't horrible enough to say no :) I kinda pity the people who do the same thing, set up a proxy for their own personal use and watch it get used by just about everyone and their dog.
    • At the uni level the proxy situation is a bit vague. It can be argued that the student is paying for education, and if the student wishes to waste the money, so be it. It is kind of like a filtering mechanism. Those with discipline will graduate. The trouble begins when the student is on grants or even scholarships, though with the later the amount of wasted money tends to be self limiting.

      Below the uni level, where in most cases the school is expected to actively structure education so the kids will

    • Maybe someone should put up a free proxy with banner ads in the top. Doing proxy in a frame.
      Somehow make a couple bux outta it. Maybe offer some service as a Boss button, and quick links to sites, strip gfx, etc. Maybe force to view 1 sponsored ad. If you want to use it enough, people will use it.

      Myself, I just use ssh and tunnel to my home unix box running squid for this reason. SSH is almost always allowed...

  • Install DansGuardian [dansguardian.org] into your Squid proxy (what do you mean you don't use Squid..?)

    Add to /etc/dansguardian/bannedphraselist:

    ' MySpace.com. All Rights Reserved.' (changing the ' for angle brackets)
    • I haven't had to manage a firewall/proxy for a school (or any other organization yet), but where I work I do admin the local LAN/WAN links. This was exactly my thought - why not just inspect all packets flowing through your proxy and search for repeatable information? Then just block as needed.

      I was also thinking that a whitelist solution would be an interesting idea as well. ie: Use a pop-up window, having the student "request" access to a apecific site, with reason; this way, you can file the student'
      • I see so many attempts to get at MySpace through proxies it would be a full time job to find them and ban them, and it's a losing battle. Much simpler to block the content itself. I predict it's only a matter of time before someone makes a portable firefox with some form of crypto plugin to use with some form of crypto proxy however.

        Whitelists for websites are no good - for any reasonable sized organisation it would be too great a task, plus an extremely annoying hindrance to legitimate research.
    • Damn right! I'm a sysadmin at a school and we do exactly that. Dansguardian and Squid together are wonderful tools!

      I don't know what everyone is fussing about really. Never had a problem with DG - seems to block everything you want it to without any issues if you know what you're doing.

  • Recent Joyous Discovery (Score:5, Informative)

    by Balthisar ( 649688 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:40AM (#15855378) Homepage
    Despite years of fiddling with my own home networks and hearing about ssh tunnelling, I'd never set up an ssh tunnel and never "got" the reasons for it. That's changed recently, and now I'm a convert. I know this is basic crap among most of the /. crowd, but here's how I can anonymously surf at work:

    I have Proxomitron at work to get through the firewall. It acts as a local proxy server, and works with our something-Point firewall. It seems like only ports 80 and 23 are open. No port 22 for ssh, and no ports for email.

    Using puTTY configured to look at the local proxy server, I establish the appropriate ssh tunnels to my Linux box at home. I don't know why this works, so any explanation would be cool. I'm using port 22 via the Proxomitron local http proxy over the corporate http proxy to my plain vanilla Linux box. Fscking mystery to my how it works, but it does. Setting up puTTY to work directly with the company firewall doesn't work, and I have no idea why. Proxomitron is required.

    Of course now with all the right tunnels, I can use FireFox on my Linux box or even Safari on my Mac (if I leave it on) via VNC, and I have instant anonymous surfing. Yeah, I know I'm using a helluvalot of bandwidth, and I generally don't need or do any anonymous surfing anyway.

    So, what's my traffic look like to my company IT boys for my interesting setup? I'm assuming that my secure ssh connection doesn't let anyone know what I'm doing over ssh; that's the point. But yet I have this traffic flowing out of Port 80 to Port 22 somehow, and it's either little tiny bursts when I'm working in bash, or it's a bandwidth hog if I'm using SAMBA or VNC over the connection.

    -----
    The whole initial point of the excercise was to talk to my MythTV box while on the road. All I wanted to do was ssh in to check my RAID status. I also had all kinds of ports open on my router so I could http into MythWeb, and Webmin, and MythStream, and SMB, and the router itself, and ftp, and generally a big mess. Now all I need is my single ssh port, and I'm good for everything without all of those open doors. At work I use puTTY, at the hotel I've got my iMac (remind myself to look for an ssh tunnel control panel so I don't have to keep using the shell).

    Even with ssh, I'm subject to brute force attack, right? Wasn't there something like a magic knock I can setup so that I ping a certain sequence of ports in the right order, my ssh port opens up, otherwise being closed? Probably won't work for me, as I have a proprietary hardware router...
    • So, what's my traffic look like to my company IT boys for my interesting setup? I'm assuming that my secure ssh connection doesn't let anyone know what I'm doing over ssh; that's the point. But yet I have this traffic flowing out of Port 80 to Port 22 somehow, and it's either little tiny bursts when I'm working in bash, or it's a bandwidth hog if I'm using SAMBA or VNC over the connection.

      Actually, any decently sized company would have the ability to inspect the packets, either from a sniffer or a local-to-
    • Either you use only private keys for authentication, or you rate limit password attempts (and how many are allowed within a certain amount of time). Both work quite well, but the private key method is the most secure way possible.

    • Re:Recent Joyous Discovery (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It sounds like the firewall admins at your work are taking it pretty easy.....

      Checkpoint (and any 'decent' firewall these days) has the ability to do protocol inspection and enforcement of things like HTTP and if the admins at your work either upgrade to an appropriate version of Checkpoint or simply enable the protocol inspectoin (if already running appropriate code) they can easily enable the function to stop you doing what your're doing.

      ...which then means you have to try to tunnel your traffic
      • but then who of us works for a company that's willing to kick down dollars for sensible security measures?

        Sensible? Those types of things are only sensible for a very limited number of environments. Many companies are willing to spend for signifigantly more security than is actually required for their situation. (And most of those companies proceed to set it up incorrectly so that they're not actually secure anyway).

      • your IT team should have fully locked down SOE images to prevent you installing and running your own apps (Cisco CSA works well), have disabled USB, CD and floppy drives

        That policy is something I don't understand how it could be reasonably applied in a software company. I'm a software engineer and I don't know how I could work without being able to run whatever software I want. I'm not installing software every day, but I do need full access to USB (using USB devices is part of the job), being able to r

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @11:49AM (#15855421)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • So... you want to homeschool your kids.. because of filtering software at school?

      Are you fucking kidding? Going to school is about having a social life and being thaught things by professional teachers, nobody gives a fuck about whatever site the school can filter, actually if the school you'd want to put your kids in had not a single computer, that would be just fine.

      How silly can you be to take a decision that heavy of consequences for your hypothetical kids based on such an insignifying detail? I hope I

    • And you probably only *think* you learned it yourself, and that the rest is insignificant and useless. Sure.

      If you have an issue about filtering, just wait until you do have kids and you think about home-teaching them. When they spend all day surfing myspace, slashdot and porn sites the filter software will slam down big time on them, and you'll be standing over them making sure they're using the computer to learn stuff that you consider to be useful. No doubt they'll be posting to slashdot that when they h
  • Isnt this some sort of 'intervention device' or some such nonsence and illegal ? ( or at least banned under some international treaty )
  • I can't help but question the approach used by many schools in regards to blocking social sites. The primary reason for the blocking of these sites seems to be that they utilize excessive network resources (oftentimes this is under the guise of them being inappropriate). I compare this to a town realizing "all of a sudden" that the traffic on the roads is more than they can handle. The fact is that many schools have been skating by on the bare minimum amount of bandwidth (it seems to the the norm that a

  • news? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @12:13PM (#15855512) Homepage
    1997 called. They want their story back.

    Seriously, I can't be the only one here who wrote a CGI proxy server so that I can get around censorware (like BESS) while in high school. I even sold access to it to my fellow students!

    Code is simple:

    # fetch the url specified after the "?"
    # prepend the url of the proxy to all link tags
    # print the page out to the user

    So all you have to do is run apache with this CGI from home, and you never have to worry about censorware again.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I don't understand. It's not a place of absolute freedom already since MySpace is disallowed. Why don't these folks who seem to have such a penny up their ass use whitelisting? Hell they could just sever the connection from each PC to the internet and have only approved content on local servers, updated by admins if they care so much.
  • I'm a sysadmin, not the network admin at my company, but from what I know, all the PC's are on their own VLANs. Any requests from these VLANs to outside networks are blocked by the firewalls. The firewalls are set up to only allow port 80 and 443 traffic from the Proxy, which is on a seperate VLAN. From what I can tell, it's pretty locked down.
  • I work for a company outside of the education process. However, we hire lots of young people, either as summer positions, or as newly graduated employees. The MySpace accounts created by school-aged members are not revoked once they come of age. My company can't easily do a whitelist, due to the nature of our business, which includes using the Internet as a search tool. So we are put in a position of blocking myspace and other such portals, so that the bandwidth is available for work activities. Using a pro
  • Proxies have been forever, and have been the problem forever. But mass access to the Internet and real problems resulting from it happen now. Proxies and blocking access are just a small countermeasure...

    A story of yesterday night:
    - anonymous at /b/ [4chan.org][NSFW] finds a way to find separate private user profiles on Photobucket in the recent [photobucket.com][possible NSFW] directory.
    - more /b/tards embark on a quest for more amateur porn by watching this page.
    - they find about 80 pics of a girl naked, masturbating.
    - they find out m
    • Moral of the story: don't trust 4chan.

    • - anonymous at /b/[NSFW] finds a way to find separate private user profiles on Photobucket in the recent[possible NSFW] directory.

      http://forums.photobucket.com/showthread.php?t=126 40 [photobucket.com]

      07-02-2006, 02:10 AM
      If I have my album private, does that mean the photos I upload will not be featured in the recent images? I would assume a photo uploaded to a private album would not show in the recent images, but I could not find an answer when I searched the forums.

      07-02-2006, 02:41 AM
      You are correct. An image in a privat

      • > but I didn't see anything on img.4chan.org/b/ to backup your statements.

        for the simple reason threads on /b/ are extremely short-lived. They get "marked for deletion (old)" in about a hour but most of them die off long before that - usual lifespan of a thread doesn't exceed 15 minutes. That's why /b/ can get away with posting some stuff that definitely wouldn't survive elsewhere - before any authorities can react, the offending post is long gone. You either save what you want to keep or request it and
  • >Proxy Sites Offer Secret Passage to Myspace

    I can think of *so* many better destinations for Secret Passages.

  • Huh? Poignant? (Score:3, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @03:51PM (#15856156)
    "To the more advanced user, the proxy server can become a tool for malicious intent as this article, delivering an anecdote with the termination of an employee, so poignantly details.""

    The part about the firing was short and rather matter-of-fact. Where, exactly, was the poignancy [m-w.com]?

    In the words of a famous Spaniard, "I do not think it means what you think it means."

  • Whitelisting is the necessary answer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @04:12PM (#15856215)
    Schools and others who wish to restrict access need to start whitelisting allowed sites, rather than blacklisting prohibited ones. Yes it's a lot more work to whitelist a thousand useful resource sites rather than blacklist MySpace. However, if the schools work together on a single system they can spread out the burden sufficiently. Otherwise it's just a game of Wack-a-Mole.

  • Filter Complainer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Deviant Q ( 801293 ) on Sunday August 06, 2006 @04:49PM (#15856306) Homepage
    Just this last year, our school introduced an extremely-restrictive proxy that would often block legitimate research sites (as well as all the fun ones.) In addition to finding a few workarounds (ping to get IP address, use that instead; google translation; etc.), I wrote a happy little program that I distributed throughout the computer lab.

    What did this program do? It ran in the background, monitoring Internet Explorer's address bar (couldn't find a nice API for Firefox, but mozilla.org was blocked anyway). When it detected that the proxy had taken over (http://www.lghs.net?blockedsite=mozilla.org&reaso n=ADULT-CONTENT), it sent a nice little email to the IT guy. It was very polite, just saying a sentence or two about how I believe site.com had been added to the filter list in error and I would request its removal. Multiply that by every blocked site ever visited, though... :-D.

    (Yes, I know it's probably not moral to use school computers for this. Yes, I know he could have created an email filtering rule to send the messages to the trash. I liked it, and so did the users. *Shrug*.)

  • Bullshit article (Score:3)

    by hyrdra ( 260687 ) on Monday August 07, 2006 @01:10AM (#15857526) Homepage Journal
    From TFA:


    I recently had an employee, an MIS employee at that, fired. He was using Anonymizer at work. We have a tracking system (Web Inspector) and I kept noticing that he was leaving no tracks.

    I consulted with my supervisor and he decided that I should analyze the employee's system. I found footprints, hacking, and a batch file he used to delete all Internet traces. So I sent the system off to forensics and they found all the bits, each and every one. We're now in legal limbo. The employee is being fired, not for the hacking or the batch file, but for using the Anonymizer.

    Thought maybe you'd be interested in hearing about the dangers of using the Anonymizer in the workplace. They claim the Anonymizer hides your tracks at work--but I guess not all of them.
    --Name Withheld, Network and Computer Systems Administrator


    Anyone who reads that from this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" will be seriously scratching their head. First, they used a tool from the same people that make Webwasher pseudo-ware. This software basically looks for HTTP GET requests and prepares a report. Then he mentioned they found evidence of a leet batch file, "footprints", whatever those are, and of course this employee of theirs was some leet uber hacker going to deploy the latest and greatest worm on their network of poorly secured network running some sort of automated intrusion detection ware.

    Then he ships the system off to Forensics (what company has a Forensics department I don't want to work at) and they were able to find all the bits, maybe even some bytes. When it came down to it, the company supposedly terminated the employee for using an online anonomyizer service, assuming they couldn't prove he was using it to break company policy.

    If this story is true, which I highly doubt based upon the anecdotal evidence of this so called "Network and Computer Systems Administrator" they should have fired none other than this dumbass. Bullshit article.

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