This is strange. I'm at school, and half an hour ago I tried to go on the forums, but Bess (a webpage blocker/internet nazi) blocked the forums for the reason "Drugs", but now it's not blocked.[HTML][/HTML]

Okay then?

I just thought it was strange, and a little funny.

Bess is a really stupid firewall and my school district somehow fubars it every once in a while. Once it blocked every website, and actually had a reason for each one.

What did it say for Google? Or Wikipedia?

Google was "Search Engine"
Wikipedia (which is blocked now) says "Reference"

Sites are blocked all the time for "News", "Reference", "Computing", I'm waiting for one that says "Education"

https://palary.org > Bess

Does it still have the Golden Retriever in the logo?

Back when i was in school, they used bess as well. Sometimes (depending on how your schools IT guy set it up) u can get around bess by going into safe mode with networking. Sometimes being the key word, but if people are paying attention to what you are doing you'll have a hard time operating in any sort of safe mode without it being fairly obvious. The gigantic windows and text are usually a dead give away. I know that you can almost always use it to get around parental controls though, since most are on a program that activates at start up, rather than being activated by choice. As long as you dont activate the program once you go into safe mode it will not begin to block you at all, but bess is a proxy server (i think) which means it wont always work if you dont have independant access to the internet from that computer, but most schools nowadays are smart enough to make sure that doesn't happen, or you would just turn it off when you get on the computer. I was lucky, our school just assumed we were all dumb.

It probably does matter how it's set up, but I was able to bypass it by simply using Portable Firefox.

Good morning, Bess.

I might be impressed if someone knew where that was from.

If you change the name Bess to Dave, then I'd know.

Hah. Reference. That's good.

And if you then changed Dave to Vietnam, then I'd know, too.

Why would a school block a search engine? Or a reference? Why even have internet access at all? It's a SCHOOL! They are supposed to be using sites like wikipedia!

Many teachers won't accept Wikipedia as a reference because there's no qualification for posting or editing content.

Sure.

But that's not a halfway decent reason to block Wikipedia.

Some of the students got hold of the disabling password to my school's net security. Office Workers, great for intel work.

My school also had something called "SynchronEyes" I think. It allowed a supervising PC the ability to basically seize control of and watch your PC. I pioneered a way around it by way of disconnecting the PC from the network so it would fail to startup then reconnect it. Worked like a charm...

By pioneered you mean looked it up on the internet, right?

thats why if i ever use it, i skip out the middleman and cite the articles sources.

I get past Bess way too easily. The school "hid" a proxy registry file for IE6 on the school server, along with a file of the usernames and passwords of hundreds of students, along with 2 teachers.

It took a while to figure out how to access the server, but from then on it was simple.

Yea, I went into the program files and disabled it from starting up on restart too. Wikipedia is also blocked at my school.

All of the computers in our school district go through the county's servers before they can get on the internet. That also means they have to go through a proxy. I believe just one server or a small cluster is in charge of it, and when it goes down, the whole county goes down. It is quite a disaster when it happens and all the teachers go crazy. Our school server went down the other day and its amusing when you go to do something and then realize you can't access your files.

Surprisingly, no. The idea of looking something like that up never crossed my mind then...

Our school had tried all sorts of completely stupid stuff.

Eyeguard was the first. It took snapshots of your laptop screen (looked for stuff like porn). I don't know how good it was at detecting that, but I do know it used 40% CPU constantly. So I simply ended the process, tracked down the .exe, and renamed it. Whenever the tech guy would come to check our laptops, I'd rename it back, and reboot.

I also used Knoppix regularly, which naturally didn't use EyeGuard.

After about 95% of the school started disabling it, they stopped installing it on our PCs. It was funny, because they knew we were turning it off, but they couldn't really do anything about it.

Then they started using some web filtering system that I don't remember the name of. It was pretty damn effective. It used a proxy, and disabling the proxy in any way (Even using Knoppix) resulted in nothing. It filtered a lot of common flash gaming sites, porn sites, and such. The most annoying thing however was that it blocked large file downloads (like anything larger than 2MB).

Then we started using CGI Proxies. While it was unable to get around the file size restriction, it got around nearly everything else. Because of this, they continued to tighten the filter more and more, until...

They broke it. Literally, the web filter crashed from the amount of filtered sites. The internet was down for a couple days, but at the demand of the teachers, the internet came back up with no filtering whatsoever.

In addition to the proxy and filter, they also had port filtering. They started blocking common IM ports, like AIM's. We kept changing the ports, finally resorting to 80. They then implemented packet shaping, which killed all of it.

That also died when they brought the internet back up. There were no filtered ports, no proxy necessary (it was there but no one used it), and no web filtering.

For the last two years of my time at the HS, they never did get the filtering working properly again. That is, until the last month of my senior year.

This idea was insanely awesome, but also insanely dangerous. One kid, who assisted the librarian, had easy access to the server room, which was attached to the library. One night, he waltzed in, and plugged in a wireless AP. It had a big custom antenna, with it's power boosted quite a bit. He hid it somewhere in the server room next to one of the other wireless APs that the school had.

He plugged that wireless AP into the router that supplied internet to the servers. After an hour of configuration, he had set up a new private wireless network using the school's internet. It totally bypassed all the server's software and filtering, and was strong enough to reach about half of the school, including the cafeteria (major hanging out spot). He gave it to his friends, who also gave it to their friends.

Didn't take long before half the school was using it. I graduated, so I don't know if it is still there. I would imagine he's discovered it by now, but it was hilarious.

Your high school gave students laptops?

It was part of tuition, if that's what you mean.

Wow.

I would install Linux permanately, just to see the expression on the tech guy's face.

My school is downright horrible though, they have SynchronEyes installed on the typing lab computers, and have almost everything blocked. Luckily, on the programming computers, almost nothing is blocked.

If your school has Novell and you want to learn some hints, PM me. I've been doing many things to get access to the whole server, it's a fun on-going project.

I did eventually install Knoppix onto the hard drive by deleting the "backup" partition (that didn't work, and they didn't use). I just dualbooted at that point.

Of course, when I installed it, the techs had stopped checking our laptops because we weren't running EyeGuard anymore.

But now I'm in college :p

College has a few blocked ports, but no filtering. They even have "public" PCs that you can use, that aren't really part of the lab. They don't have much software on them, but they're good for screwing around between classes.

Back at my grammar school there was the obligatory WebSense blocking. Which didn't really block much. All we did anyway was play games on the absolutely ancient computers since Doom was about all they could handle.

And not once was it removed.

It's bad if you leave CS 1.6 on your desktop, too.

My school had a tiny little computer lab with about 12-16 computers which never worked and constantly got moved from one room to another and could only be used if a class requested it about a month in advance. We had bess, but nobody ever bothered to bypass it in nearly any way because the computers were so slow that even if you got anywhere fun you wouldn't enjoy yourself anyway. A few of us did learn to turn it off, but only to be able to say we could. i got past it in safe mode a couple of times, but only to see if i could and i never really did anything once i had. Like i said, our computer lab was lame and none of us ever really tried to have fun in there. But thats public school for you i guess.

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Oh, and not that i really care or anything, but this rabbit looks awfull familiar. Is he watching over you as well?

At the end of my senior year, I'm going to patch my computer's ntoskrnl.exe to have very interesting startup graphics. Should be fun.