Oh shit. Internet-censorship in Helsinki!

[nybergh]

Guess what happened in all the schools in Helsinki yesterday?`

The Helsinki Education Department have silently decided to start to control all outgoing http-traffic with a hair triggered censorship program on the proxy servers. That ist the most stupid thing I've ever seen.

The URLes get censored, meaning that all urls containing certain words cannot be displayed. An example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/****%28computers%29
The most outrageous thing is that Helsinki is a bilangual city, both Finnish and Swedish are official languages here. The thing is that the word that is spelled S-E-X (sorry for that, i don't want to make this page impossible to open at school) in the swedish language (yes it's spelled exactly as in english) has two meanings: First it's what you think of first. The other meaning is SIX, 6, the freaking number!
There are other stupid examples of pages that can't be opened, that wikipedia article is maybe agood example.

There also is some kind of database of "bad" sites, not only those who use explicit words at the front page. For example www.googlism.com is filtered. But why the hell is not www.micetrap.net/ blocked then?

before we were able to download anything via http. things like kazaa and DC++ have been bloked for ages now, but I'm not complaing about that. Now we can't download exe's, dll's and zip's and mp3's! (these are only the file types I've noticed so far). This also makes sites like www.allmusic.com unusable as the site is bulit upon dll's. Just try to search on themain page of allmusic and you'll se that the URL refers to a dll. What kind of moralist degenerate lunatic hypocrite moronic incompetent it-staff agrees to put on these kind of restrictions? It's a well known fact that bureoucrats can decide anything, but I feel petty for the souls of tose poor bastard who had to install this crap and didn't stop this from being done!!

OK, my school is a upper secondary school and I'm seventeen years old! And they think I should sit behing the same filters as a seven-years-old? WTF?!
Actually, I can bypass this filter easily, becouse I'm in the administrator team and I'm one of those who's got full domain access. Internet Explorer seems to send the file rights to the proxy server and thus I'm able to surf freely. There are younger admins, they've got local admin rights, and for them this isa disaster! Can you figure out what it means to try to keep 70 machines in good condition as a team when half of the team members don't have http access to zip's and exe's!!!!

AND now I can't use firefox properly anymore. I shouldn't complain, I get unrestricted access with IE (we're ten students with full domain admin rights in our school, this is actually not allowed as a policy, but our school is a media school that needs to have the PC's in good condition all the time so it's an exeption. But I'm afraid that we're the only ten students in helsinki with these kind of rights) but when you've used firefox as a primary browser for 1 year I can tellyou that it feels like shit to switch back to IE.

Have you experienced shit like this. I can't remember being as pissed of as I was in about 12 hours yesterday.

Check the attachment, this is how the blocking looks like. The notification is in Finnnish,but you can feel the evil wibe of it, right? The notification tells the user to contact the administrator of the school ifthe notification is wrong. WTF! Most schools have circulating admins that are responsible for even five schools in a region. They appear to every school like once a month! How the hell could they do anything about this? Mostly they're fifty years old jerks with an incompetence that is ounbearable! Did you know that some schools in helsinki still force their students to use Netscape 4 from 1998?!

(hey, mods, move this thread to the Bitchlist if you think it's necessary)

[siebe83]

That's ridiculous!
I already complain about not being able to use Firefox at university, but that's nothing compared to that...

[missyob]

I guess my age is going to show here. When I was growing up we did not even have the internet. We had to go to the library to do all of our research so I never had to run into challenges that you face.

However, my middle son got detention for going to a website that was not on the "approved" list at school. When the teacher called me to tell me about it, I asked her what the site was. I was very concerned thinking that the boy was going to porn sites. - the site was music.com. My personal opinion was that this was the stupidest thing I have ever heard of and how can they punish him for that? At the same time though it is the rules and he has to follow them.

Is your team going to go to administration and fight them on this?
~ Missy

[nybergh]

@siebe: Why can't you use firefox at uni? I'm sure you have a network drive that is your home dir. I run my Firefox from my network home directory at school, and that works well, unless you care about firefox starting up as fast as IE.

@missy: It's kind of weekend now, so nothing happens now, but I can't wait to see the irritation next week when people start to do things like logging off Yahoo accounts (for some reason that triggers the filter) and downloading free, legal music to USB-memories among other things. (There's a couple of finnish sites that are distributing demos, much like mp3.com that has grown very popular). And some people who don't have broadband at home usually download windows/anti-virus updates to memory sticks too.

Generally these filters disable irc and messanger programs, our computer class is open all the time and people go there during breaks and lunch to check thair mails and chat, so I guess there's going to be many angry comments.

I don't think this is going to last very long, people will get angry, but this is veeery irritating.

I already posted a very

[siebe83]

Originally posted by nybergh
@siebe: Why can't you use firefox at uni? I'm sure you have a network drive that is your home dir. I run my Firefox from my network home directory at school, and that works well, unless you care about firefox starting up as fast as IE.

I'll try that!
I do have a network drive. I already installed Winamp on it, and except for one problem (it keeps asking me to register) it runs fine now (only after some tweaking). I assumed Firefox wouldn't work at all for being unable to write to registry etc. But I'll check it out

[auhsor]

Neh... We had that at our school, and it didnt bother me too much. We couldn't access any email places such as hotmail. All our traffic was monitored anyway, so I had no desire to go to places that I knew would be blocked, except when they blocked games sites.

[General Geoff]

You think that's bad? Holy hell, in my former highschool, they run Windows 98 with Novell Netware and FoolProof Security suite. You literally can't do ANYTHING. Right-click is freaking disabled, you can't even highlight more than one icon on the desktop, only Programs is shown on the start menu (no run, search, or My Computer). You're not allowed to open My Computer on the desktop, you're not allowed to move or edit ANY files, including ones you made in your home directory! That was the most fascist network regime I've seen to date. To most, it seemed infallible and uncompromisable. Me? I simply turned the computer on, waited for the Novell logic screen to show up, clicked "help," and clicked "File, Open.." and navigated to the FoolProof directory and renamed it. Then I logged on and got a bunch of errors about not being able to find files, and unrestricted PC access. Man I love being a nerd.

And before you say "but those were the rules, they're their computers and you're bound by their rules to use them," first off I certainly did read the terms of usage for the internet and the computer in school. I DID NOT, repeat, DID NOT agree to them. I never signed any papers, including the ones about acceptable use of computers. I expected to be called to the office to be asked why I didn't sign them, but nobody called, no announcement was made, and I went underneath the radar of the system for four years. As such I could probably have gotten away with all kinds of stuff and not gotten in trouble for it, because I didn't sign ANY of the school's policies. I didn't agree to any of them, but they never asked me to sign them again.

[nybergh]

To continue on my last post: I posted a very ironic and provocative post on the internal discussion forum of my school (i even included a link to a hackguide; http://www.zensur.freerk.com/), and I've gotten positive response from both students of the politically more active type and some teachers, so I guess other people than I do care about this too. I think the official statement of our school has been made, a very popular IT-techer posted something like "that this whole thing is good, becouse we've planned hacking classes for a long time and now the Education department gives us all the material we need " and he seemed quite pissed off generally, the filter seems to block access to a newspaper his of home regions...

[General Geoff]

"Oh, we put these up so we can teach students how to bypass them."

Interesting logic. If they're telling the truth, it's actually a good idea. Sounds like a cover-their-ass story, though.

[cyu]

Well basically, about two weeks ago, in my Computer Science class, every machine is now monitored by remote to some place uptown, so basically every school computer is interlinked. I didn't really mind that, but they also removed dos and put a hell of a lot more restrictions on things. But luckily, mozilla.org wasn't blocked and guess what? I could access the C drive and cmd through FF!

Oh and linking all computers to have the same restrictions is BS. I mean elementary school I understand, but hell we need a separate filter for high school. It would be funny to have someone hack into the main system uptown and change all the pc backgrounds to goatse, that would be interesting.

[nybergh]

Originally posted by General Geoff
"Oh, we put these up so we can teach students how to bypass them."

Interesting logic. If they're telling the truth, it's actually a good idea. Sounds like a cover-their-ass story, though.

Hm, well I think I was a little unclear. That teacher was sarcastic towards his employer and he clearly dislikes the system, and I guess 99% of the other teachers, including the headmaster hates it too. No, we don't have hacking classes , but i'm much happier now that I know that some teachers are as angry as me and my friends.

[mark]

in our school cgiproxy works, but most urls for it are banned. solution: host it yourself

[dlichterman]

*cough* Http://secure-tunnel.com *cough*

[k_rock923]

bascom is evil

[Phyltre]

At the same time though it is the rules and he has to follow them.

Where does this logic come from?

Why do people take this for granted?

[Mattress]

Eh, they're providing the internet access, it's their pipe and they can decide what comes down it.

if you don't want restrictions, buy your own access.

[MStar]

We have a filter, but it isn't as restrictive as that. We started using web proxy sites, and they caught on to us and now those are blocked too.

[nybergh]

Quite funny, the headmaster didn't get to know anything about this beforehand. Now on Monday he made some calls and got to know that this all id becouse of the IFRAME voulnerability in IE. Some high authorities in Finland decided to recommend that users should not use IE until the IFRAME voulerability has been fixed. And becouse switching to safe browsers requires some admin work, and most schools don't have resources for that,so this was the "only alternative". Why the hell didn't they config the proxy to detect the browser that is beng used? Many schools have blocked the accessto IE, allowing pupils to use only Netscape 4 (!!!!) or in some cases NS 7,so I think that complete filtering for all browsers is very unnecessary.

[PrintScrn]

The Public schools arond here (elementary, junior high, and high school) all have filters on them also. It's annoying, but it is helpful. Kids would take typing classes and spend the entire class period playing shockwave games and the like. I'm not sure how restrictive it is, but I think it's necessary.

[EazMan]

hehe, yes thats bad but ..... in my school the computers are ibm windows 95 and a handful of compaq and dell windows 98s, instead of windows we use this shit called schoolvista were your interfaceis supposed to look like a school classroom and all the programs are on the "bookshelf". on the so-called internet has evrything blocked when my teacher asked u to find political jokes for geography the sites were blocked because they cntain "non educational humor"

even more stupid, they have a request form for unblocking sites so i spent the rest of the period teling them to unblock the game sites

[Psythik]

Originally posted by dlichterman
*cough* Http://secure-tunnel.com *cough*

Also try http://surfeasy.info . With it, I can bypass the filters on my school's network for every site that's blocked.