Thursday, December 27, 2007

Accessing Restricted Websites at School

I can't read this article from the Seattle Times on my school computer. I don't know why but it is blocked by something call Cleanpass that (after some researching) is operated by ITOP. Now, it's not the first time that I've worked at a place that has had some Internet restrictions, but it is the first place where I can't understand the logic.

There's already tons of information on the Internet for bypassing web filters, but the key words that you want to learn are Anonymous Proxies. Anonymous proxies are computer servers on the Internets that you can hide behind. And by hide behind I mean that instead of your computer directly asking for information from an Internet server, your computer now asks the proxy to ask for you. By doing this you can also ask the proxy to muck about with whatever information is involved in the transaction but for accessing restricted websites we just want the the proxy to re-write the URL so that the filter doesn't match it on its offensive site list. Other stuff, like cookie management, advertisement blocking, etc. are aspects for the truly paranoid.

So in the end, and just from a Google search, I can access that Seattle Times article via, Zend2 (article), YouHide (article), or Proxify (article).

2 comments:

Jess said...

Another proxy server that works extremely well is www.stupidcensorship.com. They put up new proxy sites fairly regularly.

Jen @ Light Enough to Travel said...

OK NOW I understand why Rachel loves you so much ;)

That's great. Thanks for the geeky information! Keep it coming.

J