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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.
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
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!
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.
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?
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...
He's a Slashdotter, why on Earth would he ask someone who knows?
;-)
But he asked what was the *moral* thing to do.
In which case I would have thought a lawyer would be the last person I would ask...
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.
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."