Re: [MLUG] Getting SSH around despotic firewalls

["Igor Izyumin Jr." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wednesday 13 February 2002 21:19, F Vernon Green wrote:
> I work at the Santa Paula School District here in California. The blocking
> is a result of the Federal Children Internet Protection Act. It basically
> says that all internet traffic, both web and e-mail has to be filtered for
> content. You are not going to get the school board to change their stand on
> it, since it was not their policy to implement it, they have to implement
> it in order to qualify for Federal funding.
I know about that.  They have had filtering for a while now, but they've 
recently blocked off all outgoing ports except 80 and 443.  Note that this 
neither blocks any web nor email content.  From what I've heard, they are 
thinking that they are improving security this way.  Someone needs to install 
a DDOS client on the computers - maybe this will bring them to their senses.

> Incidently we had to do it here too, what we ended up doing was using an
> IPrism that runs on FreeBSD. A company that sells the filters and the
> service to keep up with all the web content are the ones that actually do
> the blocking. The administrator can also open up whatever sites they want.
> Iprism will re-evaluate sites according to their content, I found it
> interesting that EVERY online dictionary is blocked.
They are using some crap from 8e6 technologies.  From what I see, it only 
blocks proxy lists, anonymizer.com, sites with the 7 dirty words in the 
domain name, and a couple of PC gaming sites like gamespot.com (I cannot 
comprehend why - the flash games that everyone plays in class still work).  
It is trivial to bypass the system by finding an unblocked web-based proxy or 
setting up your own.

> E-mail is filtered too. We do not offer e-mail to students at our district,
> but any school that does has to by law filter all e-mail according to words
> in the heading and body of the e-mail.
Our school district has nothing to do with email, other than that the 
teachers have it.  Hotmail still works.

> Bottom line is that unless you have some stupid administrators at your
> district that are going to allow you to bypass all their protections,
> anything you want to do at school is going to be filtered and or read by
> someone else.
Well, I don't mind filtering too much (I don't look at porn while in school), 
blocking ports and stuff severely pisses me off, since I use them for 
legitimate activities (such as maintaining the school website).  In fact, it 
pisses me off almost enough to devise some fun way of screwing with them - 
such as setting the homepage of every computer in the lab to goatse.cx 
running through a proxy (don't go to that site unless nobody's around - it's 
enough to get you fired).  The funny thing is that it's really impossible to 
prevent this unless you completely shut off the Internet.
-- 
-- Igor
--
To unsubscribe, go to http://mlug.missouri.edu/members/edit.php

Archives are available at http://mlug.missouri.edu/list-archives/