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.
My school even blocked archive.org because of this. Good luck checking like ⅛ of Wikipedia references.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
But funding them better would require cutting the military budget by 0.1%!
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.
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.
