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Ethics of Proxy Servers?
Mav asks: "I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising. After querying them about how they knew the site would produce traffic they stated the site was going to be running PHPProxy (an open source web proxy). The traffic was a result of him and his contacts (nearly one thousand of them) using the site to bypass his school's firewall in order to view their MySpace pages and get access to their MSN messengers. Given all the attention social networking sites have recently received and the various laws attempting to block or control access to them I feel guilty and unsure making this available. Are there legal implications that I need to worry about? Could I be held liable if one of the students got in trouble? Most importantly, what's the moral thing to do?"
You need to find out for yourself what the moral thing is. I believe it is moral to help people gain access to information, so I'd do it. Do you?
As far as the legal aspects, I doubt there are any laws in your jurisdiction regarding setting up a proxy to get around a school's filtering software, but then again, you can always be charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor for anything these days.
I would get a lawyer. The world has gone insane!
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
If you're even bothering to ask this question, then i believe you might not want to do it. School filters are annoying; the favor you would be doing is immense. But as to whether or not it is moral or not: is P2P, bittorrent, are pirates and people who share moral? Yes, question with a question. Why are you asking this question. ?.
sometimes, nothing.
It's an interesting question, obviously filters are there for a reason but they just blanket block so many useful websites (www.google.com for example...).
Why not try blocking certain websites that trouble you (porn, myspace, etc.) and leave the rest open for us honest users?
"Oh boy"
Is this a high school? Jr High? University?
I think if the expected student is a minor (HS or Jr High) I would pass.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Next semester I will be studying in China and I'm looking forward to experiencing the Great Firewall firsthand... or perhaps not. I expect I'm probably going to need to use a proxy to visit a lot of sites. It really depends on the situation; in my situation I would say that a proxy is entirely ethical.
Lalala
Well if you want a legal opinion, talk to a lawyer (IMHO, its a would open you up to civil suits from over protective parents)
If you are worried about local opinion of your business of helping kids break their school rules, then its a dumb idea
If you just want to have an "in" so you can pick up high school students, then go for it
I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, if the school moderately has their act together, they'll be watching their outbound traffic, see a big spike to the proxy site, and you'll end up on the block list inside of a week anyway (which might be less time than it takes you to get everything set up).
Second, I believe that when school kids are on school property using school equipment, the school should get to decide what they're allowed to do. My employer sure has this right, and it's also certainly a firing offense for me to bypass it. I salute schools that don't let kids play on the Internet when they're at school and should instead be learning. Sorry, school time is time that students should be using for, I dunno, learning. MySpace and MSN don't qualify, if this is really what they're looking to get to. So I wouldn't do it on principle (though of course realizing the kids will probably manage to find it somewhere else anyway).
Many people complain about schools, but things which I see as reasonable attempts to keep the kids on target are hollared at as censorship or some other poorly-fitting term which is basically the equivalent of saying, "We think kids should be allowed to do whatever they want, but we also think you should make them learn material they don't want to at the same time."
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Create an accectable use policy which forbids illegal and unethical activity. Then create a process which ensures a response to reports of abuse. In most jurisdictions, you've covered your butt.
Dear Slashdot,
Last night when I was standing in front of my local 7-11 waiting for my bus, two teenagers came up to me and asked me to buy them some beer. I like having a beer as much as the next guy, but is it ethical for me to buy it for them?
You didn't say what size school it was, but a thousand students? That could be an entire school. So, some kid has told you that his entire school wants to get round the filtering and wants you to help. How are they going to advertise this service without alerting parents or teachers? How can you be sure that one talkative student isn't going to tell her parent's that she can get on MySpace because "some computer guy is helping them out"? How long do you think it'll take those parents to report you as an online MySpace sex pest?
Leave school stuff to school kids. If you really want to help them out, tell your friend about free proxies that he can find via google, or even better, TORpac. Even better still, tell the spoilt brats to wait until they get home. If you want to earn some more money, either work harder at your present job, or look for a new one.
I don't want to sound blunt, but there's better ways of making a living than facilitating kid's "social networking".
Legally, create an AUP which people must click through that basically says you wont use the site to do anything bad, surf porn, etc. IANAL tho.
Morally though, that only you can answer. You bothered to ask, so that may be your answer right there. Personally I think school filters are annoying and pointless, because everybody assumes that the second you turn 18 you somehow become magically mature enough to handle porn/violence/cigarettes/lotteries, things which you apparently couldn't handle at 17.995. Schools just want to cover their butts and I can't say I blame them. However our society as a whole is increasingly becoming a nanny-state where people must be 'protected' from 'bad things' rather than educated about them and informed on how to protect themselves or make good choices.
Realistically though, whoever runs IT on the school probably isn't stupid. If they see a bazillion hits to the same site they'll probably check it out, and figure out what it is. At that point it gets blocked. And if you don't use HTTPS, they can just traffic sniff it.
What I would do is make the site go HTTPS immediately, and the resulting page looks like a search engine, and function like one with a google API or something. Have your friend encourage everybody to use it as a search engine as much as possible, so the resulting traffic spike doesn't look suspicious. However script it so if you search for a particular string of terms (IE the password of the week) it dumps the facade and takes you to the proxy page. Also have a cookie so if you manually punch in the address to the proxy page w/out first searching for the password, it takes you back to the search page. This should make it last quite a bit longer.
--IronHelix
My advice, don't be a dick, if people need their goddamned myspace they can buy a computer and an internet connection. I get sick and tired of waiting in a queue at uni to use the library catalogue because every 18 year old tool is busy "LOL ASL"ing away on the machines my fees pay for.
Ah, that rant felt gooooood.
So I won't comment on the legal aspects. Ask a lawyer.
The moral aspects are easier, because you don't need a degree to argue ethics. Just an over inflated sense of self importance. Check.
Is it moral to do X? Well, that depends, on you, the society you live in and how willing that society is to beat in your head for violating the morality of that society.
Is it moral to have sex with your childeren and then kill them for your own pleasure? I think the general opinion is not.
Is it moral to kill thousands of childeren each and every year because you like to drive to fast/drunk for your own pleasure? Look at the number of childeren killed year in year out because of dangerous driving and I think that the general opinion is yes. Except offcourse nobody will admit it.
Morality is a complex thing and it seems to have a lot to do with whatever the "people" can be bothered to get upset about. Or rather a small group of people can be bothered to shout very loudly about without anyone else shouting back.
It ain't even consistent. On a small scale people might agree on say restricting road speeds near schools, but if you suggest that the speed across the entire town is brought down to a safe limit, or even worse, put up camera's to enforce the speed limit, then you find yourselve with massive opposition. Or at least very loud and that surely means massive.
At the moment you got a "thinkofthechilderen" movement who is very massive, or at least very loud. They say, that it ain't right to let childeren access places like myspace unrestricted. Are they right? Do they even represent a majority of the people? Do you consider what the majority considers to be right, to be right? Note that the "thinkofthechilderen" group can't seem to be bothered by the deaths in traffic wich outnumber the victims of sexual predators.
I myself got the following problem with this idea.
Not to long ago there was a police request for witnesses in a the free dutch newspaper metro or spits about a rape case. A woman returning from a date late at night had been assaulted and raped walking back alone. A comment by a collegue was that her boyfriend should have walked her back.
In a way he was right except that he shouldn't be. Should women be restricted from were and when they can walk because some men are rapists?
Should childeren be banned from socializing online because some people prey on them online?
The next step in that logic is that they asked for it. This is the old sexist way of thinking wich I definitly think is amoral.
So I don't think childeren should be prevented from accessing spaces like myspace. Restrict the criminals, not the victims.
Is it then moral for you to break restrictions against childeren that can be considered by some to be morally wrong.
Well, obviously not. The only thing that could be wrong if you consider breaking that restriction itself to be a morally wrong act.
Like say, you consider it morally wrong to let someone starve to death but your only option would be to steal the food wich you also consider to be morally wrong. A choice of the lesser of two evils.
But I find it hard to consider a proxy to myspace to be morally wrong on its own. Myspace may be wrong, but not on any moral grounds.
Say you provide the access to these childeren. This results in them posting their details on myspace. Someone else uses these details to hunt one down and rape and kill them. Are you then morally to blaim?
That depends on the morals of the person judging you.
Is the boyfriend in the above real example to blaim for not escorting his girlfriend home? Is society as a whole? Is the girl? Or is it just the rapist and nobody else that should be held accountable for what happened?
If you provide access you provide access for, what I would consider, a in itself harmless actions. There are plenty of safe ways to behave on myspace. You do not make these kids behave in an unsafe manner. Part of living is t
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's up to you to argue for it. At the risk of starting a mindless flame war, it's possible to argue for or against abortion, capital punishment etc and both sides usually believe that they are the only side to be acting morally.
Or another pair:
I think that someone who believes in any of the opinions above, and lives by them, can be a moral person. You need to think about what YOU believe in. We can't answer that for you.
In this day and age, I'd say it's best for you to cut your losses and run, legality notwithstanding. The laws are so muddied that it wouldn't surprise me in the least if you could and would be held liable for the students actions. It sounds like this third party is doing something illegal to generate traffic. He is even soliciting criminal activity from a student body. This would give me pause to even trust that individual.
Where there are loads of free proxies already available.
Many will even pass through https traffic. Personally I use MegaProxy so the banks NetCop can't snoop, but even the free sites are feature rich these days.
I'd say just stay away unless your friend can offer up a better explanation.
A message from our sponsor
Proxy = good, as other people have pointed out information is supposed to be available to everyone all of the time.
Giving something to someone's child allowing them to circumvent parental authority is bad. The school's authority? I'm kind of split down the middle. Legally, you'd be screwed and could be held accountable if you're a US citizen.
A kid would ask for a proxy to use his myspace account meanwhile dreaming of the gigs of porn he's going to download on county bandwidth. We're rather evolved, but giving kids porn is still frowned upon. It comes down to , do you have and can you show you had a reasonable expectation that you work would not be used to break laws? If the child used the proxy to do things that would not be illegal for a minor to do outside of school, you should be ok (but could catch some flack). But you can't count on kids to use things as intended.
If you configured phpproxy, for instance so that if the requested URL was ! myspace.com or somedomain.com, then you've done what is called 'due diligence'.
If you put up an OPEN proxy with no restrictions, then you can have a reasonable expectation that your proxy WILL be used to break laws (mostly CC fraud), which would make you rather irresponsible, and accountable.
The same debate can be applied to Gun makers enabling criminals to do bad things.
As soon as the school's network admin finds out that MySpace and MSN are being accessed through your proxy he/she will simply block your proxy as well.
It is not worth your effort, as their access to your proxy will not last long.
Though if the admin has allowed users the privilege to set their browser's proxy, then they can simply use a list of public proxies to change the proxy in use regularly to stay one step ahead of their network admin. If their admin is clever enough they can put a stop to that easily enough as well.
School has nothing to do with MySpace or MSN, and I agree with blocking that trash from entering an institution of learning. (sad as they might be these days)
The kids can use their cellphones for that crap, let their parents pay.
Most states have laws against "Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor". If I were making a buck off a kid who I knew used my service to do something illegal, or even possibly if I knew that it was reasonable to believe that some kid using my service would eventually do, then this law would apply to me.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
While I will not answer to the legal or moral aspects of this question, working as a system/network/security admin in a K-8 school district I do have an opinion.
As with many places these days IT departments (if there even is a department) in k-12 educational facilities are understaffed, under-funded and over worked. This is not a complaint this is just stating the facts. There are several districts that I can think of off the top of my head that do not have a full time technician or administrator. The care of IT systems is left to the librarian, math teacher or whomever is the most "technically inclined" teacher or staff person in the building. They will get paid a couple grand to do this as well as their main job of teaching. The main work is left to consultants who might be good. But nevertheless are only onsite when called for. This is not the description of some poor district in "Middle America" either. (No offense to the poor districts in Middle America) For the districts that or fortunate enough to have an IT department the staff is busy with the maintenance of the districts networks, systems, training users, etc. There is little time left to monitor the browsing habits of a 14 year old. We rely on content filters with updated rule sets and teachers who spot a kid doing something bad in class.
I would humbly request that you do not open yet another proxy. That will eventually end up on my content filters list. But students these days are not looking for free access to information. They are looking to bully the kid next to them. They are looking to surf sites that no 14 year old should be on or play games during class because they are too important to learn.
I am all for students pushing the edge and learning. I applaud the first kid who figured out that a proxy would work on content filters. If they figured out why I would even be happier. Heck I would explain it to them if they asked.
Hopefully someone reads this and figures out that it would be nicer to help out the school district in their area versus work against it. It has a hard enough time educating your children or friends. Why make it work harder than it reasonably needs to?
Even worse are the high school IT administrators and librarians who just get off on blocking sites. Block MySpace? Good riddance. Block webmail? You've got to be joking. These people are so far down the food chain they need to get their jollies pissing off kids.
I don't know of any basic theory of civil law which would allow a claim by the school - but local laws can add to that, and I'm not faimilar with the DMCA or the child protection laws.. but I would look to those as sources of trouble as well.
If the children's parents decide to press the issue, they might be able to bring a claim for interference with their rights as parents to regulate their children's media diet.. which they have a right to do (sorry, ideas should be free folks, I'm just addressing the current state of affairs).
My real fear for you would be a criminal charge.. something like intentional circumvention of a security system, or contributing to the "corruption of a minor". That would have to depend on the statutes in your state.. here is one of the NY statutes that might apply (just as an example of the stretch: N.Y. Penal Law 260.10(1) provides that a person is guilty of endangering the welfare of a child, a class A misdemeanor, when he "knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to the child's life or health." Persons charged with endangering the welfare of a child under N.Y. Penal Law 260.10(1) need not be a parent, guardian or otherwise in loco parentis. Bold added for emphasis: source NYPRAC-CRIM 32:10 (West) Acts creating a risk of harm to the child within the meaning of the endangerment statute include the infliction of excessive corporal punishment, supplying children with alcohol or drugs, having a child join with an adult in criminal activities, involving a child in sexual activity,[FN15] failing to provide a child with required medical treatment or other medical necessities, or other miscellaneous conduct creating a risk of harm to a child. ibid
So, if these students are engaging in sexual or drug oriented collusion through myspace, and you are knowingly enabling that access, the prosecutor might ask the court to stretch the existing law to cover those facts. It's within the light of reasonableness to my ear (not saying it would happen, but it could happen).
On the other hand, maybe nobody cares.. who can say, get a lawyer.
-GiH
I work for a HS... We have filters and such because we are REQUIRED by law... Because somewhere along the line, the overwhelming majority of your parents thought it was a great idea to keep you safe from all the CRAP that is 99% of the internet.
It Pisses me off to no end when little snaughts think they are hot just because they can find a proxy and surf myspace or adult sites.
(Yes, after 7 years in HS and 5 yrs before in college support, I've grown cynical of the crap that is turned out as brains...)
MySpace and other social networking sights (yes, this is gonna be a blanket statement) are worthless and BAD for children. I don't care about the age 18 thing.... If you need "faceless" friends that bad, then purchase your own pipe at home and surf from there... but considering that we are ALL paying for the internet in schools (Universal Cost recovery Fee/tax on phone bills) then it is a waste of my time and the money of the tax payers for you to be using it to watch the latest viral video advertisment from coke or pepsi. (Product placement... watch for it...then ask how many of those vids are "REAL") Or looking for boobies on myspace or google images.
I admit that there are some legit uses for a proxy... like if you live in China or some country where access to books and information is banned by the gov, etc.. BUT, using it to bypass a school filter is NOT a legit reason.
The second reason the filter exists is because you should be LEARNING! Not learning how to hack/bypass things, but shit that matters.... This is one of the reasons (IMHO) why we rank so low on the global education scale... The internet should NOT be in cassrooms, Computers SHOULD NOT be in classrooms. Maybe a computer teacher with overhead and possibly smartboard, but nothing else... Have a few labs for the classes teaching computer software @ HS Level and a bank in the library... As it is now, 4/5 computers per room results = teacher that cant watch and guide the kids to use the internet in any responsible manner.
Get a life... Go HOME to get your vids/kicks and actually LEARN in school... When you get to college, you can waste YOUR parents money on MUDS and MOOS and I don't give a crap. (Ok, that gave away what I did in college...)
Most important, RESPECT the schools computers, we are just trying to do our job, and follow the rules that have been laid down by your parents! (And they supposedly care and love you...)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
As a student who is paying his own way through school, I do not see why my college should decide for me what I do and do not have access to (in terms of gaming in particular). Obviously the legal implications of file sharing networks justify blocking p2p traffic, but my school (and many others) see fit to block all internet gaming.
I assume you are an adult who has graduated from school at some level. Let me tell you that I as a student share your sentiment as I look around and see many of my friends addicted to games like World of Warcraft which they play through proxy servers. They neglect work and fail classes. And you can call them kids all you like but they are legally adults and they are paying the school for their education opportunities, not the other way around! I do think that if the parents are paying for the education, they should monitor their child's grades and if he fails out tough luck, he's on his own.
At 20 years old I agree, I'm still a kid =) . But you know what? I see nothing wrong with relaxing as a single young adult by playing games every now and then. How is this even taxing on a school's servers? Many games still have netcode optimized for 56K! Why should my school tell me what I can and cannot do in my free time? I am paying my school for its reputation as an academic institution, not as a parental unit.
I would say use your judgement, especially if they're over 18. Legal? No.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Keep in mind who your advertising targets are and your reputation. If you are connected with the pages, will you be ok with the public knowing the service you have been helping provide.
First there is the questionable ethics of providing filtered sites to high-school students, things like MSN messenger and MySpace, which is much in the same league as cell phones, and are used for similar purposes, which are frequently quite OK, but which also might include bullying, and this might be one of the reasons why the school has put up the limitations to begin with.
Going around this filtering seems to be similar in spirit to aiding and abetting a crime. I don't find this particularly ethical at all, but that's just my opinion. Then chances are that if, or rather when, this site is discovered to be yet another proxy by the school administration, it will become blocked as well, and what does this help anyone then?
That's just before even considering any legal hassle that may ensue. IANAL so I'm not gonna speculate any further on this.
Then there is the financial reasons for doing this that just don't seem to make sense to me. It will be done for free, with advertising revenue, from the same high-school students that presumably will use the service? What are the spending potential of these? It will depend, it might sell cell-phone ringtones and suchlike, but there seems to be some obvious limitations in the amount of money these students have to spend. And when the filtering starts, then the ad-reading and presumably profitable customers go away.
Heh, all that trouble, and for free with uncertain ad revenue -- how good business is this?
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
The ethics here are actually pretty easy. This desire to block a particular website, is someone else's rule, not yours. Nobody ever asked you if it was a good idea; you had even less representation in this decision, than your distant Senator in Washington who doesn't give a damn about you.
There's nothing wrong with not playing along with someone else's game. Dude, lose the guilt.
The risk, however, is substantial, unless your proxy is really dedicated to providing access to that one website. I'd caution you against this, for the same reason I caution people against running open wireless access points. You don't want the secret service visiting you to ask why you sent a presidential death threat, you don't want the RIAA sending you DMCA notices, you don't want your address banned from various services for reasons that aren't your fault, etc. If you proceed with this, you might want to at least keep substantial logs so that whenever anyone really powerful comes after you, looking for vengeance, you're able to pass the buck.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This shouldn't have even made slashdot.
Schools are, as you should know, places of learning. This acquisition of knowledge extends far beyond the subjects that are taught in class. Students also learn social skills, for instance. They have to face the realities of the world, including drugs and sex.
So when we consider that schools are where students should learn about all topics, including those which may disgust and offend some people, we have to realize that the only people being immoral or unethical are those who set up the filtering proxy in the first place.
Mod parent up, please.
It appears that author of TFA feels they face a moral dilemma and seeks the opinion of a peer group for an answer. Does anyone else see a problem with this behavior??
Not everyone has a strong moral compass, and that's okay. Not everyone needs one. And in any case we know so little about how morals and such are internalized that we can't even study the subject objectively, let alone provide anyone with a procedure for how to strengthen theirs.
Living without morals or ethics is not a great hindrance. For example, the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth. So don't worry about having a weak moral sense; there are other ways to lead a good life.
For instance, there are all kinds of WWJD models. Choose a couple of people who have made tough moral/ethical decisions that you admire and study them until you could predict what they would do when confronted with any of the tough problems you bump into. Then do the same thing as they would do. To an outsider, it would appear that you have a strong moral compass when all you are really doing is relying on your ability to imagine how some Good Guy would behave in the given situation. Heh, maybe that's all there is to this morality business— who could tell? It's pretty much a black box thing.
Another approach is to forego morals and ethics and all that internal crap that gets in the way of doing the clever thing. Instead, study the laws that apply directly to you, and the reactions of the neighborhoods you find yourself in, and determine from those studies what the boundaries of acceptable behavior are. Then give yourself the freedom to do anything you want within those boundaries. It isn't moral or ethical, and you'll end up with a bunch of people who don't like you very much, but it will keep you out of trouble, mostly. And you can become the richest man in the world using this approach— so it isn't such a bad way to live. Maybe.
I think the question author of TFA really wants to ask is whether the slashdot community would find him acceptable if it learned that he was doing this proxy bypass of high school rules. This is a legitimate question, and should have been asked outright, instead of wrapping it in a moral cloak.
I have a mild dislike for people who attempt to ferret out my likes and dislikes by posing these kinds of substitutiary "moral dilemma" questions. My feeling is that they should grow a pair and ask the hard question directly, providing specifics of the situation, rather than playing dumbass "would you still like me if" games.
My answer to the question that I think TFA would have asked if it wasn't pussyfooting around so much is this: the school has an obligation to the student and his family to act in "loco parentis" (look it up). If the school has banned MySpace, then providing a mechanism for students to get around that ban is equivalent to assisting a kid who has been grounded by his parents in slipping out the back door. I would want to know if the school's action was blocking all student access to certain web sites (constituting undue censorship) or simply causing students the inconvenience of having to wait until they got home or to the library or a cybercafe before they could satisfy their MySpace habit. Unless the case for undue censorship could be made, I would think that anyone assisting students in getting around the school's ban was a jerk. If there is a censorship issue, I would think that anyone profiting from the situation was reprehensible jerk.
That's just my opinion. There are a lot of BG idolizers on slashdot so I'm sure there are a lot of alternate opinions.
I wouldn't do it. The primary reason being they're trying to access MySpace. It would be one thing if something potentially useful were blocked, such as how Wikipedia was filtered out when I was in highschool, though even Wikipedia is pushing it as far as justification goes in my mind.
Also, depending on where the students are when trying to access MySpace. Please note that things like this could soon be a more common legal reason not to do it. Nobody likes being an accessory.
But mostly, it's my loathing of MySpace that would stop me from doing it..
I've Done This. My School Had a filter system, so I setup a simple Cgi-proxy on a spare box I had at home. When The School blocked my site, I just changed it. They never commented on it to me, even though everyone knew it was my site. I think that the moral implications do not lie with you, but rather with the users. You can setup a simple htaccess file so that only you know who is using the site. This way if Pornographic material is accessed, you can tell who is it and cut off their access.
Say no and offer this tidbit to your prospective partner:
Proxy.org has a long list of proxy sites.
Search the web for "proxy" for even more.
Use search engine caches to see some static sites. Interactive ones like MySpace aren't as useful cached.
Kids can run gotomypc or other tools on their home PCs.
This sounds like this is purely a business thing, at which point I'd seriously question whether the ad revenue will cover the costs. Even if you don't get screwed by the school or parents (need to hire a lawyer, etc.) you are going to be providing x2 the bandwidth of anything they download, and I'd roughly estimate a click through rate of 0% on any adds, if they don't just block them completely, because if they could afford to buy anything they'd be paying for hosting.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
Take a good look at the articles icon. See the man with the tape over his mouth? Is it moral to run an anonymous proxy? It is a moral imperative!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Then you just have to get a REAL life and and enjoy REAL friends and "Get a grip" on your daily stresses in some other way...
/. it was just a day or two ago for that article)
I don't care if home is 1000 miles away... In the United States, as an employee of the school district, I am BOUND by LAW to make efforts to restrict access to certain material... unfortuanly it has to be with a shotgun approach because so many sites allow or make no efforts to police that material. AND if cerain congress acts get passed, even other social networking sites may be banned from schools... (search
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Let the kids know that you're giving them a very good deal on an unlimited bandwidth service, and make them pay for a year in advance. Then call the school and let them know what the proxy server is for. The school adds you to the block list and you get free money.
On your way home you can take candy from babies.
Mrs. Turgid teaches at a secondary school in England. The monkeys don't need proxies, they just go to google.de and search from there.
Stick Men
What would he do?
This is perhaps one of the most balanced and insightful things I've read on Slashdot recently. Ironic that it's sitting at +3.
Anyway, I think your analysis of morality is right on; there is very little point in discussing morality, at least outside of Philosophy classes, because people approach it from radically different angles. People can take the same action for very different reasons, even if they both end up doing the "right thing" as viewed by a third party.
Also, your comment about what's essentially a 'popularity contest' question cloaked in a moral dilemma is right on. If I had to guess, I'd say about 90% of people's "moral dilemmas" are really nothing more than ways of gauging the relative acceptability of various courses of action within their peer groups, and trying to figure out what's going to score them the most points (or damage them the least). This question in particular reeks of "would people hate me if I did x?"
As to the question at hand, I think providing the service would be a bad idea, but for different reasons; students need to learn to solve problems themselves, and not wait for some deus ex machina in the form of an ad-supported service to solve it for them. Left to their own devices, some enterprising young geek will figure out how to get around the filtering by themselves. It's not as if it's very hard -- a CGI reverse-proxy is one way, SSHing to a home computer on Port 80 (with the -D option) is another, there are lots of other methods -- and once they work it out, they can be the heroes of the day to the other MySpace-loving students. By providing a commercial filter-avoidance service, you are stealing the fire from some student who might figure it out themselves. But more importantly than one or two students, you are teaching all the students who use it, that all they have to do when they run into something that's a pain, is wait for someone else to solve the problem and hand it to them. It's the difference between letting them understand that the solution comes from someone else like them, who happens to understand a bit about computers, versus a solution that seems to come down from On High, by way of an anonymous web site ridden with ads.
I am a firm believer that in order to become productive, fully-mature adults, young people need to develop a healthy cynicism towards, and distrust of, authority. Otherwise, they're nothing but little brainless larval consumers, parroting back what they've memorized, and doing what they're told. They need to learn to break the rules on their own, and that they can break the rules on their own. Replacing one authority (whoever runs the filtering) for another (whoever runs the ad-supported reverse-proxy) isn't instructive. Placing an idiotic barrier (like all web-filtering is) in between them and something they want, and letting them get over it themselves, is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Do you think ads are really going to pay for your bandwidth bills?
How long until your site is blocked by the school?
Then pick a different boarding school. Those are not public schools and the parents picked them for a reason and are paying for them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Is it just me or is "firewall" the wrong word for a content filtering server??
I hear this alot, and correct it alot, but now that it's used in a slashdot story, I'm beginning to question myself... is firewall an acceptable term for a content filtering server?
Rirelobql xabjf gung EBG-13 vf gur yrnfg frpher rapelcgvba rire, ohg jbhyq lbh jnfgr lbhe gvzr npghnyyl qrpelcgvat vg???
Does the law require you to close the proxies? Does it piss you off that children are able to put you in a position where you're in violation of the law?
Hopefully that's why you have filters and such then, not because you're required to by law.
No, mod parent up.
by Kadin2048 AKA mysticgoat
I didn't know goats liked astroturf. Either that or you two really should form a mutual admiration circle jerk.
At least this time you answered the question, albeit 15% content, 85% self-indulgent pontificating crap filler.
The bright trouble kids are the best. They keep a list of who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
>>> "In terms of legality, you're in the clear for that express purpose only (visiting MySpace.) "
.... they better block slashdot too ;0)>
I think you're way off here. IANAL either but I used to work in intellectual property (patents not copyright however).
You're taking a published work (myspace pages) and creating a derivative of it (myspace pages with your ads instead of theirs). You're undoubtedly opening yourself up to a lawsuit here.
In addition, myspace (I gather) now have agreements to compensate original rights holders for bootleg material on the site, I'm assuming you don't have similar agreements!?
Someone later in this thread (#18050774) says:
>>> "You're supposing that the things that these schools are trying to block access to are not learning."
MySpace??!? There is probably a lot of learning there but I wouldn't think it's key for the majority of high-school students when balanced against the procrastination factor
First of all, if your friend isn't savvy enough to set up his own proxy server....I mean, come on, it's a proxy server....he doesn't know enough to be safely gaming the system while he's at school.
Second of all, unless you set up the proxy to only be MySpace, it will be a matter of hours before someone realizes they can surf to AnimalSex.com or something else...and minutes after that before someone like a teacher or administrator walks by the computer, sees it, and gets your server address, where upon you'll be charged with Contributing to the Deliquincy of a Minor, if not worse.
Don't do it. Seriously, if he's smart enough to know he needs a proxyserver, he should be smart enough to apt-get install simpleproxy or squid or something else on a shell account somewhere, or even just run the binary on a nonpriv port.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This is one of the reasons (IMHO) why we rank so low on the global education scale... We in Belgium have computers (with internet) in each classroom. I went to one of the better schools in belgium and they didn't even filter it... And we are on top of those scales...
We are the BORG, put this in your sig and prepare to be assimilated
I worked as a student technician at my highschool for the entire time before I graduated (four years). I worked doing everything and had seniority on most of the other people in the district. We're a fairly large district, my highschool had around 1600 people. I was paid, so it wasn't a volunteer thing.
The IT people hated the filters more than anyone because we all thought it was pretty stupid. I setup a CGI based proxy for a few of my friends and told my boss about it, my boss told his boss, pretty soon the entire IT department was using my proxy to access Fark and other sites their own filters blocked (the exception being the internet services division who had their own VLAN that was not behind our firewalls).
The point is, the IT people don't give a rat's ass to a large extent, because most (if not all) in my experience think it's a stupid idea to begin with because we know that smart kids will find ways around it. It's the administrators, those same administrators who wonder why not all spam can be blocked, who try to get us to block everything.
On the legal side, I'd get a lawyer and fashion a quick clickthrough. I'd make it hard to find, make it use SSL, and preferably have it available on multiple IP's and hostnames, change the hostname used every once in awhile to make it harder to find.
Personally, I see no ethical problems.
I hate AC... :)
No, I don't get ticked off that they put me in that position...
I have a 3 yr. boy... I tell him that he can't do something because I don't want him to be hurt. What does he do, usually the oposite of what I just told him. End result is time out or a light spanking. Did I get upset that he did it and put me in a position that I'm suddenly a bad parent? No, I'm upset because I'm trying to steer him on the correct path, but he just totally went the oposite just in spite of authority. ('Respect my authority!!!!' - Ob. South Park ref..)
This is what I see time and time in the HS... Kids that try and hack a system or use proxies not because they NEED to, just because they think it is cool that they can! Kinda told the following by a cocky one in a meeting one day with deans 'Damn the system, I'm smarter than you and all the teachers/administrators/parents, etc.. so I'm Gonna do as I damn well please and you can't stop me because if you close this one, tomorrow I'll have another.' (Not verbatium AND, this is exactly what the original post was for/intending... ) Also, they didn't care about the detention or restrictive rights on their user account, etc... I'd say that if I pushed for an expulsion they wouldn't care either. It's cool to buck the system, so they do. "who really cares..." is another I hear occasionally.
No, I don't push for expulsion... I'm not on a power trip. Usually I try and get them to understand it from our side... If they "Think" they are smarter than us... Great... Use it for good. If you see a bad sight that everyone is going to to rip on other students and threaten them with emails and prank calls, etc.. Tell us. We'll close it. Doesn't stop much at home, since parents don't seem to monitor their chilln's either. (How many little teens are flashing their boobs over Im and stuff... then it gets posted and everyone emails it around etc... Could of stopped if mom & dad really cared to monitor and teach their kids good behavior to begin with. Comeing to the deans/principal etc.. is too late. )
I'd go on, but it's getting late... But the short is... No, I'm not pissed because they put me "in my place" or "in a position" I'm pissed because they are tooo stupid and one day will screw up in the real world where they will get fired, or charges pressed against them.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Legally, create an AUP which people must click through that basically says you wont use the site to do anything bad, surf porn, etc. IANAL tho.
These are kids in school (assuming that means not adults) so it's unlikely that any click-through contract/disclaimer is valid anyway. IANALE.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Who would hate you if you did X.
great Firewall. Excellent. Really, really like that.
sometimes, nothing.
First they baneed the pornography sites. I didn't do anything because I don't think pornography is good for kids.
Then they banned the gambling sites. I didn't do anything because gambling isn't legal for children.
After that there were the IRC clients. I didn't do anything about that either, because I've never seen IRC actually teach a kid anything but how to make bombs or piss off teachers.
Now they're banning MySpace. I'm not worried since this is a waste of a kids time.
Tomorrow, they're going to ban eBay because kids don't need to be shopping in class. I said nothing because I don't use eBay.
Next week, well, we'll just see what comes. Hopefully they won't come after my site...
Send me the relevant info, and lets talk about how much I'd make in advertising.
Seriously, while I wouldn't recommend others do it, I would have no problem doing it myself. And if I can make an extra few bucks a month without putting forth much effort, I'm all for it.
We're not talking about buying kids beer, or drugs, or pr0n. We're talking about helping them with their popularity (apparently myspace pages = popularity in many schools, at least that's what the kids tell me).
Also, the police won't be showing up for a proxy server, they would not bother with that. Worst case would be a nice cease and desist letter to your billing address, at which point if it's not economically viable to you, you can just stop it.
Technically and legally, if you are based in the same country/state that has the law preventing children from going to social sites from school, you should not do this. You would be legally responsible.
If you are not, then it is a moral decision.
If you ask me, preventing children from reaching social sites from public places is outright oppression - its just over-scared parents going overboard in 'protecting' children by hampering their use of new technology and social changes.
Read radical news here
Nearly expelled for hacking the highschool computer to gain administrative access so I could actually fix the computer the people who work at highschools did not fix for over a week, and didn't catch me for over a month. My only reason was I was bored and wanted to use the faster "broken" computer, which I continued to use to receive a 98% in the course.
The only reason I was not expelled was because I personally knew the guy that worked on the computers in my highschool.
I agree that highschools should be for learning however I learned more that day bypassing windows 98 "security" than I did the entire two semesters in the course (that was actually on "computers" but was really how to use word)
Relating this to proxy: In previous years I was doing a project on, I don't even remember the topic today. Well I was doing a project on something that had access blocked for being an unverified site (it was a free web host site some were bad many were good) I used a proxy to search for real information to complete the project. School security blocks much more than they need to for their security so less of the "crap" gets through. 99% may be blocked at a school but only 95% is crap.
Bypassing the school security laws is not inherently a bad thing, doing so for 1000 dumb children to use myspace is.
What I found works (at least for me) is if the IT person decides to lift it for you. Great, you can get past the system no matter what measures you place. How about I give you admin privlages, that way you don't have to do anything just to get what you want. The only thing is you need to stop helping everyone else that doesn't know how to get around the system. One person getting around the system rather then the thousands is better in my opinion.
Go ahead and set up one more proxy. We have dozens blocked, and if another one starts getting used we will block it as well. We have a responsibility to these kids to provide a safe environment, and we also have to block things that use too much bandwidth.
If the school is actually monitoring their filter usage, you might just give kids a day or two to get around the filter. I don't think it is really a question of morals as much as enforcement.
I must say though, that mathcookbook.com evaded me for weeks. I figured that it had some useful math stuff on it. Nope.
Laws are not.
Get an attorney. Ask him about the legal aspect.
If you dont know your own moral standards, try tea leaves or something. ( you are screwed anyway if you dont know your self )
---- Booth was a patriot ----