Incredibly hard. To say that they've forced universities ( at least here in Australia ) to perform witch-hunts regularly is probably putting it lightly. But here, of course, laws are different - and education facilities are not covered by safe harbor.

That's an immense over-reaction, and illustrates the "I pay, give me what i want" attitude which does not score points and makes any sort of discourse adversarial from the get-go. Well done! Gold star for you!

The long and the short of the reality here is - if you, as a student, are asking me to take on your non-academia impacting website filter problem by appealing to my boss to get a change approved ( which then ties *my* name to it, and my boss' too for approving it ) and implemented ( which, may involve out of hours work depending on if such things require it ) then yes, you need to show a little fucking intelligence when it comes to asking me to do it. If you come at me with that attitude then I am going to dismiss your problem and then forget who you are, not because I'm a jerk but because I'm more worried about service delivery for the 12 odd thousand other faculty students that want to Get Stuff Done (tm) and not just those who complain about not getting their internet lulz. If the only reason you've got is "because I said so", then that's just not good enough.

If you come to me saying "The website slashdot.org has been unfairly blocked under the reason pornography, could you check it out?" then I will at least have some sort evidence to back up any sort of claim that the solution that we as IT have in place, may not be appropriately doing its job. If your request is additional to a bunch more that claim there's classification errors going on - I have a strong case to review what's going on and perhaps knock down the paranoia level if there's such a device or bit of software that controls it, or at least try and effect change.

As a member of an IT systems admin team for a faculty we've often got specific mandates which services we must restrict, and to what end. What you may also be up against, other than 'unprivileged' access - is politics. Students do Naughty Stuff (tm) - that's just a fact that keeps on proving itself true time and time again. Even if you can speak for you, your friends, or your entire course - I can bet dollars to donuts that there's someone out there trying to do something shifty. Case in point: I was seriously asked to relax the restrictions on banning Steam so a student could "download 10 or 15 gig so i didn't have to do it over dial-up". On-campus living - sure, i can see where restrictions like that may diminish any sort of sanity saving software platform ( Valve fan \o/ ), but I'm not going to open up a faculty network just so you can play games. It's an education facility, not your personal high speed connection to the 'net. If you were a postgraduate student researching something that required access - then by all means get your supervisor to approve your request and I'll be more than happy to make it happen.

That being said - outline a clear case of why you need certain things re-classified and you may have a better case to work with. I am not suggesting that this tactic will work - as there's probably more to the story ( see - plug and play filter lists/software/appliances which remove the need to dedicate an entire FTE to putting classifications on traffic going out ) than you really know, but it will certainly stop you from seeming like a whinging student and more like an intellectual who is using sound reasoning. Hell - if you are able to find clear, repeated examples of wrongful clasification of websites, you may be able to enact a reconsideration of what's being used to deny you access or relax the level in which things are blocked.

Of course, they might not care. Who knows?

Same. Been hovering around the 3-5 degree Celsius mark in the mornings here in Melbourne, Australia.

Though, 3 degrees Celsius is rather still okay for riding motorcycles in.

I have a Thecus n5200.

5 drive bays, two gigabit ethernet connectors, runs linux on the backend and the community is growing as far as custom hacks. Software raid, and provides iSCSI, samba, NFS and all sorts of other goodies.