Slashdot Mirror
Proxy Sites Offer Secret Passage to Myspace
JafSquared writes "As sites like MySpace.com gain popularity in young adults, schools all over are finding that taking measures to keep kids blocked out of these websites is becoming increasingly difficult. As this hype continues, proxy servers such as "Box of Prox" are springing up like wildfire. While system admins furiously work to diminish the strain placed on their school's local networks from sites like MySpace, these proxy sites are enabling easy access to restricted areas. However, schools aren't the only places that are feeling the heat. Proxies have also been becoming a bit of a complication in the workplace. To the more advanced user, the proxy server can become a tool for malicious intent as this article, delivering an anecdote with the termination of an employee, so poignantly details."
Wow, Slashdot sure is on the CUTTING EDGE of TECHNOLOGY NEWS!
I'm just waiting for more fallacious appeals to emotion in the fight against kids talking to one another.
Do politicians even consider how ridiculous their arguments are? Why, ghettos have become a haven for drug dealers, prostitutes, and other nerdowells! Do we ban ghettos? No, I believe parents simply teach their kids about the dangers of going there, and before they're old enough to understand that, the parents simply don't allow them to go there.
It's sad how human ignorance comes back with a vengeance with the emergence of any new technology or tool, without fail.
I wonder why kids have internet access at school. Do someone really want them to have ADHD since childhood? Aren't they supposed to learn something while they sit in waiting to be online back home?
Sorry for me spell bad, not a native but I'll do my best
How is this news? People have been using proxies forever to get around blocks.
Blocking sites is a half-assed solution since students will always find a way to expend bandwidth. (Personally, I think that the 'net doesn't need to be in classrooms anyway. I went to HS from 1993 to 1997 and survived just fine without going online in school.)
-b.
But the moment, you introduce blockades to access to a "cool" thing like myspace or facebook, these talents become valuable in terms of utilization. More kids learn these, use these and try to out-do the other in terms of l33tness. If there aren't the artificial boundaries drawn by the authorities, these skills would have never been learnt, developed and hopefully put to good use in the future.
Whatever they block these with, they just raise the bar for the kids. Clever, curious and with the power of the rest of the internet behind them ... there's nothing that's totally blocked off. Probably threats to those who break the security and offer real world punishments maybe, but blocking it all is impractical. Of course, then there are those who prefer forbidden fruit to the ones in the fridge, for the momentary thrill of breaking some rules.
I remember breaking the proxy at a college where I was giving a talk. All I did was ssh -D 8080 into my box and bypassed the "security" of the campus network. But I did that by unplugging the monitor cable, running ssh and plugging the monitor back on in under 2 minutes.And lo, meebo.com suddenly worked. The kids thought I was some great genius or something. THat kind of ego-rush to a 17 year old teenager can drive them to do far more than just break firewalls to get kudos from their peers.
These kind of restrictions just favour the kids who learn to use the system, instead of just fighting it on the streets like the average politico.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Half of what I learned in high school, actually probably 2/3-3/4 of it, I learned online at school or on my own time. A lot of the stuff that I read was at one point or another restricted, like a lot of libertarian stuff (including the party site) was restricted because it advocated drug use.
That's how the pea-brained morons that make most filtering software think. Yet a friend of mine would pull up porn sites like pink.com (back in the day) and laugh about it.
I have been out of college for 6 months and so am young enough to remember high school life. It was a waste of my time. I plan to homeschool my kids because they shouldn't have to "fight the system" to get anything interesting out of it.
What does the internet have to do with ADHD? Ohhhh... That's right. Anything we don't like kids doing must cause ADHD.
I work for a company outside of the education process. However, we hire lots of young people, either as summer positions, or as newly graduated employees. The MySpace accounts created by school-aged members are not revoked once they come of age. My company can't easily do a whitelist, due to the nature of our business, which includes using the Internet as a search tool. So we are put in a position of blocking myspace and other such portals, so that the bandwidth is available for work activities. Using a proxy site or an anonymizer raises a red flag in our environment, as it is an indicator that the person knows that what they are doing is against the Acceptable Use Policy. I can't believe that ours is the only company dealing with this issue. A generation that has grown up "connected" wants to stay that way -- and occasionally needs to be reminded that the resources they use at work are accessible for personal use, only as a privilege. The needs of the company to get work done outweigh the personal desire to access non work-related sites.
your IT team should have fully locked down SOE images to prevent you installing and running your own apps (Cisco CSA works well), have disabled USB, CD and floppy drives
That policy is something I don't understand how it could be reasonably applied in a software company. I'm a software engineer and I don't know how I could work without being able to run whatever software I want. I'm not installing software every day, but I do need full access to USB (using USB devices is part of the job), being able to run random software (our tools from third parties are changing pretty often) without having to wait several day to get an OK from the IT department
Don't get me wrong, if your users are just doing office work, then it's way better to prevent them running un-approved code, but most software engineers would get their productivity level way down.
Schools and others who wish to restrict access need to start whitelisting allowed sites, rather than blacklisting prohibited ones. Yes it's a lot more work to whitelist a thousand useful resource sites rather than blacklist MySpace. However, if the schools work together on a single system they can spread out the burden sufficiently. Otherwise it's just a game of Wack-a-Mole.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."