Question for all High School Students?

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I graduated three years ago, but we had this problem for my entire time in highschool. They even had Wikipedia blocked for a while, presumably because they didn't want students doing their research there. Of course, the interesting thing wasn't so much what they did block as what they didn't; I remember trying to get to some community run forums for a game I used to play, and finding they were blocked, then going to the official website for this very much M-rated game, and finding it wasn't blocked. As far as I know, they never blocked it.

That wasn't the only discrepancy in what was blocked, or even the biggest; another minor one is that youtube was blocked, but not Yahoo video. The big one, though? Despite the fact that the main purpose of the filter was to keep kids from finding inappropriate material, especially porn, people were still able to find porn through a simple google search. The moral of the story: these filters don't work, and they're kind of creepy, being government censorship.

 

[Jodah]

I enjoyed it, it was a challenge to find new ways to sites. Then they began checking history so we deleted it. Then they bitched at us if the history was clear so we only deleted the necessary sites. If you know wtf you are doing you can always beat their methods.

Then there was the time I had to watch some political cartoon, a few of us were laughing about it when the librarian came over and was like "So, what class is this for hmmm?" figuring we were screwing around. I calmly paused it and said "Honors history, if you would like to call Professor Walters I'm sure he wouldn't mind you interrupting his lecture." She gave me a nasty look and went back to her desk. I was that kid that would mouth off to the stupid teachers but the good ones loved me.

 

[Gabanuka]

Most sites are blocked at my school, The Escapist isnt thankfully.

 

[KiKiweaky]

Er dont remember much of secondary school tbh, our computers were old sheds tbh you were lucky if they even turned on.

My college did block virtually everything, the escapist, faceook most forums etc. Having free time was a disaster if you didnt have any work to do.

 

[open trap]

My school uses blocks, but they dont block the escapist. They do block google images (wierd?) but there are very easy ways around that one in particuler.

 

[Dieter Meyer]

I think blocking certain websites is just plain stupidity, on a high school you are guaranteed there are some computer geeks who find a way to pass the block... and this spreads fast, since it is common knowledge (atleast in Norway) that school's IT people dont have a very deep knowledge about things.

Luckily, my school agrees with me and nothing is blocked

 

[Da Joz]

When I was in high school (about 6 years ago), many sites were blocked and some had the internet blocked completely. But there are ways around this if you are clever

 

[Wintermoot]

if a page contains words like "gay" "sex" "homosexual" and apparently "cockpit" it will be blocked
(unless the page has a secured address (https://website.com)which you can use to bypass the blocker rendering it pretty useless)The Escapist isn't blocked (at least page without certain words)
The PC,s are blocked against program,s which is why I bring along my Laptop for games (the only thing my classmates got working past porn sites is a GBA emulator also Java isn't installed on the network) I usually play Half-Life during lunchtime.
The network is a piece of shit that becomes unusable if to many people go online.(for some reason it needs to go through a server two towns over.)

 

[Oneirius]

Half the time the computers in my school are used for watching porn. Either there's no blocking or it's so flimsy everybody can get through it.

 

[Harveypot]

My school blocks absoloutely everything. They've even blocked the Eastenders website cos there are games on it.

 

[Davey Woo]

I think MOST educational places in the UK use an Internet Security thing like that.
Most common one I've found is 'websense' which blocks things like games, social networking, message boards and forums, and of course pornography.

I think it's fair enough in normal schools, but it's piss annoying when you're at college doing Computer Programming and Games Development, and you can't search for anything games related.

 

[silver wolf009]

The Escapist comes through clean and crisp at my school, but they have youtube blocked. And their habit of blocking every single freaking sight that even mentions genocide makes it hard to do a project on the Holocaust, but that is to be expected.

 

[ThatLankyBastard]

Yep... Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, and Hotmail are all blocked...

...I don't understand why though...

 

[Jonluw]

For a while, I had to use the guest network, which had very conservative blocking; meaning that the escapist and such was blocked.

Now, the regular network has been fixed, and the only thing I know that is blocked is porn. Though my teacher has threatened to revoke internet-privilieges altogether for me if I keep surfing the nets in class.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure proxy-sites are blocked.

 

[Flig]

I'm pretty sure my highschool uses a word filter thing for most of it's censors, which is pretty effective, however they do have to go in and manually block sites that slip through the cracks, or unblock useful sites that contain the blocked words. Youtube was blocked up until this year, now it's just restricted, and uses it's own special filters to block videos, not sure how this filter works. Facebook and Myspace are blocked as well.

Also, for most censors like this, if you want to get around them(without using a proxy), just put an "s" after the "http" in the url. Of course, you have to do this for every individual page, so it can get a little tedious if you plan on browsing around.

 

[Ghost]

Everything is blocked in my school, everything. The software gives some pretty fucking funny reasons sometimes, I've seen websites blocked for being 'Alternative news sources', 'unregulated compounds', 'occult folklore and myths' and every website with a discussion board/forum/comments section is blocked pretty much, simply for falling in the category of 'Discussion boards or forums'.

The only video site we could use was some Ukrainian one but it's now blocked also, 7chan worked for a while which was funny.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

For some reason, at the beginning of the year, the censor was extremely loose. Even websites like www.addictinggames.com weren't blocked, despite being a huge gaming website with 'games' in the fucking URL.

Then, one day suddenly everything was blocked. A lot of wikis for games, Flash websites, and sadly the Escapist.

However, everyone knows a way to get onto YouTube (instead of http://www.youtube.com/ it's https://www.youtube.com) and they cannot block it.

Still, it's very loose, but it's annoying whenever I research a war and I'm not allowed on a website because it has 'prohibited guns content'.

 

[SGDeath2]

yea at school now during study hall, using a proxy server to type this

 

[Vykrel]

ooooooh ya. most popular image and video sites are blocked at my school. its kind of irritating, but at least they dont block the flash game websites