https://themarkup.org/digital-book-banning/2024/04/13/schools-were-just-supposed-to-block-porn-instead-they-sabotaged-homework-and-censored-suicide-prevention-sites
The Trevor Project? Blocked. Planned Parenthood? Blocked. NASA? BLOCKED
I did IT for a school district and staying on top of proxies was a game of whack a mole. I’d do it because I was asked too, but kids will find a new proxy that works. And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
Yeah you’re asking a handful of people who split their time across multiple duties to play cat and mouse with hundreds of teens who have copious free time they can dedicate to finding new proxies.
Not to mention, all it takes is one advanced student setting up their own proxies on something like a free tier oracle cloud VPS and you’re never going to win.
Me when i figured out I can just run an exe from a zip and casually plays Minecraft. Then sets up a socks 5 proxy using danted on guess what, a free Oracle server.
Was quite tempting to live boot an ubuntu but then I'd have to reset the cmos.
When I was in highschool the security was so poor that I was able to create a Visual Basic program that just moved the file with the system security information info another folder. I'd receive a system error that I can't move the file, but the file would still move. Then I'd reboot into default security settings with nothing locked out. At the end of class I'd just move the file back and reboot again to restore the system.
My school even blocked archive.org because of this. Good luck checking like ⅛ of Wikipedia references.
Images are available but it loads way slower than via a VPN, especially if the page isn't already archived and you need to save it yourself.
I remember when I was in high school many many moons ago, my buddy set up a proxy through his own server. (This dude was a genius for a high schooler, he was MSCE+Security certified before graduating).
We thought we were hot shit. We used it for a few weeks. Then one day we got called into a meeting with the district’s IT department. Turns out they knew we were using it all along, but didn’t care because we were mostly using it to browse gaming sites. But then this dipshit kid saw us using it, copied the URL without our knowledge, and used it to browse porn. So they had to shut us down and punished us. No network access for a month. (That kid lost computer access for the rest of the semester and failed a computer class he was taking. Serves him right.)
Some kids will find proxies. Definitely not enough that need things like the suicide prevention sites.
It should not be on the kids to do it in the first place.
We handed out proxy addresses like candy to whoever needed it. We also handed out literal CDs with compressed game installations so we would have more noobs to stomp when we were done with our work.
In my day, you just used a website that had its own browser bar, so as long as they had the address for the proxy, they didn’t need to understand anything. I imagine things are more difficult these days, and it might not be so simple.
It’s still ridiculous how much schools block, but my point was more that if the kids who do understand aren’t helping the kids who don’t, they’re not fulfilling their duty to their classmates. We saw school as all of us in it together, so despite being in the nerdy clique, we had friends outside of it because of our actions to spread the love and make things more tolerable for everyone.
And to clarify again, fuck schools blocking all this shit. They shouldn’t need proxy’s to view suicide help sites or most sites for that matter, even “off topic” ones.
They have lots of time and motivation, as well as zero shits to give about getting caught. It's Actually a pretty good thing that kids are trying to bypass security because it naturally teaches them problem solving in a novel way
And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
I watched a really great documentary about the game Oregon Trail, and one of the first bug fixes they needed to add was preventing kids from putting in a negative number when purchasing things which resulted in an infinite money glitch. The developer was amused that the kids figured this out.
I also learned that Prince was in the same middle school where the alpha version of the game was tested in 1972, which is pretty neat.
Survey data show how these inequities play out. The Center for Democracy and Technology asked teachers last year whether internet filtering and blocking can make it harder for students to complete assignments. Among teachers in schools with high rates of poverty, 62 percent said yes; among teachers in schools with lower rates, 50 percent said the same.
So neither students nor teachesr like it?
In my school in Germany, all computers were always set up in a way such that the teacher could look at any screen immediately. If a minor accesses a porn site, they’ll tell you by giggling, so what’s the need for filtering, anyway?
The US education system is a complete trainwreck. The teachers are underpaid to the point it should be criminal, and as a consequence many of the teachers are also poorly educated themselves and a lot of them are also technically illiterate as a consequence. IT departments are also underfunded, and what technical training and support they should be providing to teachers often doesn't happen. This isn't universal of course, there are highly educated and technically literature teachers, but they're few and far between.
Even worse the invasion of school boards by both the MAGA cult and Karens has turned schools into political battlegrounds where oftentimes the most successful teachers aren't the ones who are skilled at teaching, but the ones who are best at politicking and sucking up to administration.
They're actually doing more than that in U.S. schools. My daughter typed something on her school notebook in elementary school and it alerted the administration due to a keyword. I'm actually glad it did in that case because it led to some necessary follow-ups by us (no, she was not going to shoot up the school), but it still disturbed me that they were able to do that at all.
My school in the US had that too, but I don't think any of the teachers even knew about it because they never used it.
The thing with filtering porn is that it does not work. Full stop. DuckDuckGo proxies images served in the image results, and startpage has a literal webpage proxy. Not to mention the Internet Archive.
They've been doing this since the 2000s. I remember having to set up a proxy server at home just so I could connect to it and actually browse the Internet at school without every third site being blocked for no reason.
This is what happens when the schools are so broke that instead of getting proper IT they have to get the cheapest blocker possible and then just dial up the blocking to 11.
Same old same old. I remember back when some schools blocked Wikipedia article on Dick Chaney. Why the porn blocker would block any url with dick in it.
Missouri wanted those sites blocked, and the kids who are now vulnerable to suicide are the kind those people don’t want living anyway.
Fuck MISERY!
They also block adblockers (at least in my area). So I'm trying to find a good laptop for my sister to use next year.
In case it helps you, I've found that the uMatrix extension has been a great way to auto-block all Javascripts while still being able to permit just the ones needed to work past a site or network's limitations.
There's a little bit of a learning curve at first, but nothing too bad. Using the extension also feels empowering, because it gives you much more control than just a flat 'block everything' anti-ad approach.
No the thing is, the school district in my area uses Chromebooks and they're locked down to the point you can't download extensions or use another browser.
...why is "education" a category for blocks? We were afraid you might use the computers at school to learn something?
You're not supposed to be educating yourself, you're supposed to stick to the curriculum. You might learn the wrong things!
We had to take my daughter out of public school and put her in online school due to severe bullying and now I act as a "learning coach," which means I basically sit with her and make sure she stays on track. But it also gives me examples to do things to tell her when the school is lying to her. Overall it's pretty decent (social studies is remarkably even-handed for an American social studies class), but her health class is abysmal. Yesterday, they were talking about the benefits of AA and I had to explain to her that, while AA helps some people, it is not backed by science, was founded from a prayer group, and the founder thought that the actual way to stop drinking was to do AA and take LSD, so it's not even doing what "Bill W." wanted.
It also said nothing about courts mandating AA, which is interesting, since it made it very clear that you can only quit an addiction if you want to.
That's far from the only time I've had to tell her that what her health class is telling her is bullshit. Even the quitting smoking section had some nonsense and didn't even mention smoking cessation medication (I have no idea why).
Other notorious sites blocked under Education:
That's a great question and I wish I knew the answer to. Apparently, only DDG got blocked as Education/Science, Startpage was blocked as security.proxy, Bing for no specific reason and several Google variations (.ca, .nl, fr, etc) blocked as "App Defender".
The more I look into it, the more I'm left wondering who the fuck created the blocklists. The Social Media category has several instances of sites that are anything but any form of social media or social network
I suppose it's most likely some parents heard a kid was "slacking off looking at pretty pictures" and complained...
"The moon landing was a hoax" , "we shouldn't be funding people to stare out into space", "What has NASA ever done for us", and other favorite GOP tunes.
Aside from the "moon landing was a hoax", I've seen democrats express similar sentiments about NASA. At least until I point out that a lot of our modern technology is based on stuff either developed directly by NASA or for NASA by a government contractor. That and the fact that NASA is one of the most, if not the most, profitable US agencies. Like, iirc NASA provides a 6x return for every dollar spent on them. As such, I find it really strange that the US is determined to keep NASA's funding at a minimum when we could be using them to generate a lot of money for the economy.
Sure. The question was more "why would education be a category chosen for blocking by a school administrator?"
Categories such as “education” are useful for limiting access for specific groups of devices. For example, if one class has a particularly mischievous group who keep going off task from their devices, rules can be created to whitelist certain categories, and only pass traffic that are in these more straightforward categories. Just FYI.
I work in K12 IT, and the reason is that all manner of categories are defined for both blacklisting and whitelisting when creating content filter rules. So while “education” would not be used for blocking, it would be useful for rules to apply to specific defined groups or devices which can only access specific categories (such as education). Just FYI.
I didn't think I needed "protection" from anything on the Internet at all when I was a minor.
My stance has not changed merely because I am no longer personally affected. I still think that it is completely stupid to want to keep any information at all from young people in the first place.
