Comments

I take it that any student caught following your override process (and very simple and clever it is) will be considered to have violated the user/access policy you were required to sign (now that policy is something you all should take on--what a frightening thing -- asking you to snitch on your fellow students or be punished. John Poindexter would be proud) and such students would be subject to all the possible penalities. Yes?

My guess would be that you'd only be technically in violation of the Acceptable Use Policy if the site you were accessing is itself against the policy.

There aren't any provisions in the "contract" that prohibit you from visiting many of the sites that are blocked, so as far as I know that's not a problem.

Beyond that, common sense is needed.

Another way of getting round moronic filtering software is to "funkify" the URL. If the website has it's own IP (eg, it's not hosted virtually with other websites sharing the same IP on the same box), you can go to this site:

http://www.ibiblio.org/dbarberi/funky

enter the blocked URL, and it will give you a numerical URL (tho not IP) back, fe. CNN is located at http://1089212436

funky...

Only in berkeley would a high school student register a URL made of the name of his high school, and then post anarchically about how to subvert the content filtering software.

I love berkeley.

That will work, because the filter that Paul Monroe installed down at Oregon St. only monitors port 80, HTTP. 'https://' is Secure HTTP, port 8080, which completely bypasses the filter.

Oh, please. Content filtering is SO 20th century anyway :)

And thanks for the details, Mike. Only port 80, eh? That's... tantalizing.

https:// is port 443.