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?"

Comments

Proxy = good

[Echnin]

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.

Sounds bad

[solevita]

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".

Re:I wouldn't do it

[MostAwesomeDude]

I worked in a high school's computer tech center for a few years. I'm not a lawyer, though.

In terms of legality, you're in the clear for that express purpose only (visiting MySpace.) Anything else might make you liable. I would suggest a click-through.

Also, if the school is anything like the one I worked at, the extent of their blocking will be harvesting visited URLs and looking to see if there are any frequent hits at interesting domain names. However, we never caught small *.mine.nu-type DynDNS addresses unless a teacher explicitly told us, and our job was only to enforce teachers' policies, not make up new ones.

Re:I Don't Know Your Morals

[tomhudson]

"MySpace != information."

No, but 1000 kids accessing it all the time will give you HUGE bandwidth bills.

Add to that the adverts (and the bandwidth for them)

And remember - proxying doubles the bandwidth used - your server has to first fetch the page (as opposed to looking on the local file system) and then it has to send it (after rewriting the page to include YOUR ads ...

No, mod parent up.

[Kadin2048]

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.