Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites
Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites
The Trevor Project? Blocked. Planned Parenthood? Blocked. NASA? BLOCKED
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I did IT for a school district and staying on top of proxies was a game of whack a mole. I’d do it because I was asked too, but kids will find a new proxy that works. And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
Yeah you’re asking a handful of people who split their time across multiple duties to play cat and mouse with hundreds of teens who have copious free time they can dedicate to finding new proxies.
Not to mention, all it takes is one advanced student setting up their own proxies on something like a free tier oracle cloud VPS and you’re never going to win.
Me when i figured out I can just run an exe from a zip and casually plays Minecraft. Then sets up a socks 5 proxy using danted on guess what, a free Oracle server.
Was quite tempting to live boot an ubuntu but then I'd have to reset the cmos.
When I was in highschool the security was so poor that I was able to create a Visual Basic program that just moved the file with the system security information info another folder. I'd receive a system error that I can't move the file, but the file would still move. Then I'd reboot into default security settings with nothing locked out. At the end of class I'd just move the file back and reboot again to restore the system.
My school even blocked archive.org because of this. Good luck checking like ⅛ of Wikipedia references.
You can't watch most porn or YouTube videos on the Wayback Machine anyways...
Images are available but it loads way slower than via a VPN, especially if the page isn't already archived and you need to save it yourself.
I remember when I was in high school many many moons ago, my buddy set up a proxy through his own server. (This dude was a genius for a high schooler, he was MSCE+Security certified before graduating).
We thought we were hot shit. We used it for a few weeks. Then one day we got called into a meeting with the district’s IT department. Turns out they knew we were using it all along, but didn’t care because we were mostly using it to browse gaming sites. But then this dipshit kid saw us using it, copied the URL without our knowledge, and used it to browse porn. So they had to shut us down and punished us. No network access for a month. (That kid lost computer access for the rest of the semester and failed a computer class he was taking. Serves him right.)
First handful of security lessons for your MSCE friend haha.
Lol never stand between a teen and their smut. It is a losing battle.
Some kids will find proxies. Definitely not enough that need things like the suicide prevention sites.
It should not be on the kids to do it in the first place.
We handed out proxy addresses like candy to whoever needed it. We also handed out literal CDs with compressed game installations so we would have more noobs to stomp when we were done with our work.
Which is great for kids who understand how proxies work.
A suicidal kid might not.
In my day, you just used a website that had its own browser bar, so as long as they had the address for the proxy, they didn’t need to understand anything. I imagine things are more difficult these days, and it might not be so simple.
It’s still ridiculous how much schools block, but my point was more that if the kids who do understand aren’t helping the kids who don’t, they’re not fulfilling their duty to their classmates. We saw school as all of us in it together, so despite being in the nerdy clique, we had friends outside of it because of our actions to spread the love and make things more tolerable for everyone.
And to clarify again, fuck schools blocking all this shit. They shouldn’t need proxy’s to view suicide help sites or most sites for that matter, even “off topic” ones.
Kids should not have to rely on other kids to get advice when they're feeling suicidal.
Agreed.
They have lots of time and motivation, as well as zero shits to give about getting caught. It's Actually a pretty good thing that kids are trying to bypass security because it naturally teaches them problem solving in a novel way
And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
I watched a really great documentary about the game Oregon Trail, and one of the first bug fixes they needed to add was preventing kids from putting in a negative number when purchasing things which resulted in an infinite money glitch. The developer was amused that the kids figured this out.
I also learned that Prince was in the same middle school where the alpha version of the game was tested in 1972, which is pretty neat.