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Web Censorship on the University Campus?
Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"
Even if your University is in the minority, it is part of a disturbing trend.
Most of those filters are designed for corporate or under-18 environments.
Universities have wildly different needs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.
But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.
Even during the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.
[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.
It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...
Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.
I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.
I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.
It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.
Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... that in a facility full of teachers and information, students would still have to make network connections to outside sources, in order to learn. ... that in an environment in which huge amounts of learning occurred for over hundreds of years before the Internet was even invented, it only takes one generation for people to become convinced that learning is impossible without the Internet.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
RTFS! How is the Village Voice and anatomy sites high bandwidth?
I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.
If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?
If their concern is high bandwidth items, then they can institute bandwidth throttles, instead of blocking data completely. If you really want to wait forever for your large file to transfer, you should be able to get it.
Yeah, and I supposed if you lived before computers and heard of a university prohibiting students access to books that most people had access to and that would be educationally useful, you'd dismiss it with comment about how people used to get their knowledge transmitted orally from the elders, and would it be too much to ask if students just went back to doing that...
OH! OH! I grew up in San Antonio. Lemme guess! Is this private school St. Mary's University, the school with a crucifix in every hallway? Gee, do you think they'd really censor your internet access? Gee....
Way to turn your anecdote into a culture war! This is a small, PRIVATE college in San Antonio. I don't really think it is part of a larger trend. The OP didn't mention it, but for all we know it could be a religious institution. How many small private colleges are you talking about in Canada?
Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"
Monstar L
Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.
... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.
She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.
I maintain that the content is what's important
With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.
Give students in on-campus housing the same speed they would get in off-campus housing for the same price, with maybe a minumum speed, say, 1.5-down/384-up built into the rent. If your equipment permits it, don't count on-campus traffic towards that total.
If someone wants to pay $30/month for 6-down/1-up or more for even higher bandwidth, they should have that option, assuming your equipment allows for it.
After all, if they lived off-campus that's what they would have to do.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.
It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.
``If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?''
If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.
My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain
If this is a trend, the only thing disturbing is that a new football stadium is probably a higher priority for a University than better network equipment and bandwidth. My undergrad was at the U of MN and they constantly wanted their own football stadium--they would spend any amount of money and create any parking problems necessary to get it.
Well, from the University's perspective a football stadium is probably a better "investment" then better bandwidth. Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.
My impression is that computing resources at universities have always sucked. When I was in a computer graphics course at a school that was very reputable for Comp Sci, back in 1997, the SGI machines available to us in the lab were nearly unusable. I don't completely remember the deal, but they were slow-ass X terminals, and there weren't many of them available. My friends and I were more productive programming at home, on our Windows machines using Voodoo graphics cards, and porting our work back to the school machines using GLUT. We weren't leaving campus to learn, but we were definitely leaving campus a lot to complete our coursework.
:-)
I'm sure it's like that at nearly every school, at least for Comp Sci programs. You pay huge bucks for tuition, and use your own home resources anyway. I'm sure the off-campus students at the submitter's school have cable/DSL, and their on-campus friends just come over to use it when they need to. It's cheap, no big deal.
Anyway, you're at University to prove you can achieve your goals. You jump through whatever hoops you need to, in order to get that piece of paper. Cynical, I know.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).
It does more to attract paying students, but not nessesarily 'good' students.
I would be very surprised if 'foodball stadium' listed high on the reasons for attending among the students who go on to do well in ways that reflect on the university.
That's why I went to UTA in Texas, where there was no football team at all. Of course, every year, some "involved" freshman would write editorials in the school paper about why we needed one, launch a campaign for "student government" (why should those people have control over me?), etc., trying to get a football program restarted, but they never found enough support to win, and I suppose eventually they always went on to a sports/party university like they wanted so the rest of us could stay and do what we came to do.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This is censorship. The college I go to blocks all the slashdot articles pertaining to games for some reason, even though there is a Video Games degree in this very school.
I often find that useful articles with algorithms or techniques get blocked this way.
One would think that the obnoxious handholding stops after highschool......
Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.
Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.
My school did not block any websites that I was aware of. What it did do is throttle bandwidth to students who used to much of it (if you downloaded too many gigs of stuff in a single day, you would get your bandwidth throttled down to Dial-up speeds for a day or two, and then it would reset). The bandwidth levels were high enough that you could play video games online all day without reaching your limit- unless you were downloading several movies a day, you weren't going to be affected.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Having recently graduated from college, and having friends who have attended a multitude of other colleges, I have noticed that content blocking is very rare. The only blocking I have heard of with some schools, was to block file sharing programs. Not quite sure if they just blocked the sites to download them, or blocked the protocols, or what, but this was all roughly four years ago when Kazaa and the like were hitting peak usage. Schools were getting sued and campus networks were swamped with traffic. Another answer to the file share problem at one particular university was to implement bandwidth quotas. No individual could exceed xGb up or down within a given time frame. Recently, the girlfriends college started messing with AIM use on campus(not fully sure what they were doing), probably to prevent virus. I was lucky enough to have completely unfettered web access and am very greatful for it.
When it comes to blocking "questionable" content as seems to be the case with you, I have not heard of this practice, at least among most east coast colleges. I for one think it is a bad road for a higher education institution to walk down. Colleges and Universities are about education in all its forms. They are also for students that are usually legal adults and are mature enough to use their own discretion for what web sites they visit. Blocking P2P sites cause you don't want to get sued, or limiting bandwidth for the sake of keeping the network usable are perfectly legitimate practices in my book (as annoying as they may be). But colleges and universities should by no means censor web content and do not let them tell you that it is a common practice among the colleges and universities.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
" 1) the students are prevented from leaving campus to search for information ..."
Safety, weather, amd transportation are ways someone is prevented from leaving campus.
"2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. "
"I can't speak for every university, but the private university I attended never had a hard copy version of the Village Voice or other such material on campus (my college years were pre-internet). If I wanted such material, I had to go off-campus to get it. I knew where to find it, but I had to go off-campus."
so did I, but the world these students live in is a lot different then the one we lived in pre internet. You will be expected to use the internet effectivly in the work place.
This new medium is how research is done, and quite frankly, it can be a lot better way to get information then the olden days.
Keeping bandwidth at 256 is fine for research, but there is no reason to block news sites.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I was looking at schools I actually took this into consideration. A schools focus on sports VS academics was a major deciding factor actually. The more interest in and money spent on sports the less interested I was in that campus. It showed a distinct flaw in the thinking of the administration that I knew, even at 16, would perpetuate into the rest of the campus. Are MIT and CalTech known for football? Nope. Do they even have teams? Who knows and who cares. That is not why one goes to college. Either of those schools on your resume and no one will care if you went to a football game or not. Sports programs should be required to live and die on their own, with NO school funding coming out of my tuition I was working two jobs to pay.
Before you think this perspective is born out of being a "geek" who never played sports etc, I was on the varsity swim team starting freshman year and JV football team for two.
I have to deal with WebSense on a daily basis. Yes, "proxy avoidance" sites are blocked, but only ones that they know about. The solution is simple: create your own proxy server outside of the filtered network--and keep it secret.
;)
The way I did it was download CGIProxy from my home computer and dropped into the cgi-bin directory of an unfiltered remote webserver that I control. Now whenever some seemingly arbitrary site is blocked (usually under the category of "Personal Sites"), I just go to my own personal (and secret) proxy server and enter the blocked URL. Note: you may have to change all text instances of the word "proxy" within the CGIProxy file to something else for it to work.
MP3 blocking is a little harder to get around, but is possible as WebSense only looks at the extension after the last dot of the filename. The solution is to have your proxy respond to a "fake" URL like "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3.prx" and have it pipe the real file located at "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3" through the fake URL. I've modified my copy of CGIProxy to do just that, and it works like a champ.
Of course, all this information is for educational purposes only.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.
As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.
Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, which... what the hell?"
I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.
Yes, like Royal Military College in Canada: 137.94.0.0 to 137.94.255.255 -- go nuts
By the way, a military institution, beholden to the vast majority of the most fucked up government rules imaginable, blocks absolutely nothing. Monitor, yes; block, no. I could surf for the naked pictures of Taco's mom to my heart's content and not get blocked once. Though the admins might have something to say about what I was looking at.
To the OP, tell your CIO they're just as much of a joke as the school IS is becoming...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
As the CIO of a university, I can tell you that there are two trends in this area going on at colleges these days... depending on the type of college that you are. Every college currently faces bandwidth challenges. Mainly, these come from P2P technologies like Bittorrent, Ares and others. But, more and more problems are coming from sites that offer Flash video and the like. There are a lot of tools that automatically detect these uses and can "prioritize" the traffic on the network. In general, it is best not to attempt to block these tools entirely as this causes some clients to port search... and that can do more harm than good. Plus, these tools in and of themselves, are not bad. The other trend for more conservative colleges is to content manage. Generally, it is religious institutions who place in these restrictions. Further, these tools do not, in and of themselves, manage bandwidth use at all. That is not their main intended purpose, after all. Their purpose is to limit access to what the college deems as "inappropriate" content. I can say that in public institutions and private universities, like mine, that are not strongly tied to particular religious beliefs, there is no trend to install content management systems. That would generally be viewed by those institutions as an affront to academic freedom. For general reports on trends in colleges and universities, I would check out Educause at www.educause.edu. They produce excellent reports on current trends in IT at universities. I hope this helps! William M. Oglethorpe University
What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?
To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Furthermore, many things that would be considered pornography are the subject of legitimate study in the arts, social sciences, and media studies. Hell, there are social psych courses that have involved the use of deliberately explicit pornography to produce "shock reactions". There's really very little you can get away with censoring at a university, because almost any information in the world is being researched about and analyzed by someone.
In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.
Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts, in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.
I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?
Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.
Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .
And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).
I'm betting you haven't:
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
I'm a system administrator at a college in Alberta, and at our institution, academic freedom is a very key consideration in any technology we bring on campus. We can encourage and suggest from the administrative side how the academic side should use technology, but the faculty do not have to use any given piece of technology unless their department requires it. Also, we could never implement something like websense style filtering, there are legitimate reasons to look at almost anything on the net from a research point of view sometimes.
There are rules about what you can surf for in the labs and library. Those are enforced by the lab monitors and library staff, and if necessary, via non-academic misconduct proceedings. In the case where a faculty member or student knows they will be viewing potentially offensive material, for example, research on pornography or hate speech, etc, there are protocols in place for how they can get what they need without subjecting others to having to see it on their screens. Additionally, when research type things might violate the terms of the Acceptable Computer Use Policy, there are systems in place for users to get specific pre-approval to violate the ACUP for research purposes.
Basically, here the academic freedom of students and especially faculty to investigate, learn about, research, and publish on any topic is more important than any other concern. It's our job as an institution. What we do have is bandwith shaping to prevent inappropriate uses or entertainment uses from eating so much bandwidth that they prevent others from using their freedom for academic uses.
I work for one of the larger tertiary providers here in New Zealand, and we heavily restrict the surfing of staff and students. Our baseline policy could be described as "personal surfing is allowed within reason" but the reality is we barely tolerate it at all. Our policies basically ignore the students, its targetted at keeping the staff inline and the students just cop the side effects. We block all streaming media, pretty much every audio/video format, major archive formats (zip, ace, rar, etc), exe's, msi's, I could go on. Every week usage reports are compiled, and any non work/educational related sites in the top 100 are added to the banlist. This is all ontop of using commercial blocklists as a base. I suspect however that we are not the average tertiary provider, and that our blocking is positively draconian compared to many of the others.
If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.
Get corkscrew and use the following in your .ssh/config
ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").
Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).
And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)
PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I don't know is this is the school mentioned, but if so, by the looks of their web page regarding network access, Trinity has a horrible set of computer access rules. Trinities rules would be more than sufficient reason to live off campus if one were compelled through some misfortune of life to be forced to attend such a school.. asp
http://www.trinity.edu/its/policies/tigernetusage
I've had computer access at five universities in the past two years, and none do anything like this. Each in a different state, three private, two public, all in the top 50 (USN&WR), all but one in the top 20. Maybe it's common, but not at good schools. Which schools does your CIO really want to emulate?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Too much to ask me to limit my research to the physical holdings of my school's library? To have to wait weeks for an inter-library loan for any other material that might be important for a big paper? Hells yes. Nearly all decent academic journals are online now, and there's no possible reason for me to waste time physically tracking down articles in the library if I don't have to.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Im from México and our school does have an Internet filter to a lot of things. Sometimes critical information. It first started about 10 years ago with the excuse of cutting unnecessary use of bandwidth by taking away all ports but the ones needed for web surfing and opening basic ones for REGISTERED and justified IPs. Once they had that controled, they added a filter for web content, the filter is called N2H2 and blocks anything that has things related to games, nudity and whatever other not-academic content. If you want to access a website that is mistakenly blocked you cant go to the university network people, you have to contact the company that makes the filter...
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. -- Carl Sagan Sh!fty
What are you talking about!?! Our football team is undefeated since 1993! :-P
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
I have recently returned to my native land (that's Scotland, that is) from Denmark having attended University both there and here. The Scottish network policy seems to be to ram the Computer Misuse Act down people's throats and then set up filters so that they can't break it anyway. That and the constant threat of expulsion for minor transgressions. Technically I cannot access anything that is not directly related to my studies as to do so counts as misuse. This includes checking private email and using *MY* print credits to print out non-academic material. The Danish attitude is that "you are an adult so behave like one" and they leave the network unrestricted. As long as you do not break Danish law then you will not be bothered by the University or anyone else.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
This is not a matter of the difference between school and the so-called "real world". Universities are institutions of learning. If they give higher priority to an overly-protective sense of morality, they have failed to fulfill their basic purpose.