Google blocked by school

My high school was terrible for this, Every site was scanned for banned keywords and if any were found site was blocked instantly, Some of the words weren't rude either, Such as "Gay" or even in once case "Exotic"
 
Its all about Weighted Phrase Limits...

A: There are certain words or phrases, which carry a weight or a value. These are generally words or phrases that have sexual or violent connotations. For instance the word sex will carry a weight of 5, while rape has a weight of 20. If the sum of all the weights on a page exceeds 120 then we deem that page to be nonviewable and it gets blocked. Certain phrases may have a weight of 200, so that if that phrase or word is anywhere on the page, even once, we will block the page. Weighted phrasing is just one of a number of methods we use to scan the contents of a page. It is the way we catch pages that have never been seen by our system before. Sometimes this will be too strict and block a site such as a newspaper or church because they discuss these topics. The filter cannot determine why the phrase is on the page, only that it is."
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RHS said:
Blocking Google is insane, what are the IT folks thinking.
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I can go one better than that.

Our County Council, Northumberland, is about to deem all SSL certificates invalid on school's curriculum internet, as they're unable to block the Facebook and Twitter https address.

This has the obvious side effect of rendering Google unusable, now that Google only uses https. Everytime you load Google, change to a new page of results or click on a result you get a certificate error.

Of course, being the County Council, this is totally pointless, as they can't actually block https addresses, so all you get is a certificate error, so they're merely doing this in an attempt to discourage you from using them, but if a child had decided to load up Facebook in school, they've already chosen to ignore school policy and are highly likely to be off task, so a little certificate warning isn't going to stop them.

Who thought this was a good idea?

It was meant to be introduced yesterday, but they've either had a sensible pill or, as is normal for County, are way behind schedule.
 
Energize said:
Set up your home PC as a web proxy, I.T. dept can't ban it because you can change the ip address at will, they'd have to create a whitelist.
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a whitelist is an allowed list. you mean a blacklist for blocking, which any filter will have anyway.

but it largely depends on the filter, if the site isnt in its database some take a guess based on content/traffic. so still may not work.
 
neil_g said:
a whitelist is an allowed list. you mean a blacklist for blocking, which any filter will have anyway.

but it largely depends on the filter, if the site isnt in its database some take a guess based on content/traffic. so still may not work.
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No, he was right the first time.

In order to stop you using your own proxy that you can change the IP address of at will they'd have to set up a whitelist of approved sites the students can access and block everything else.
 
Ascendancy said:
No, he was right the first time.

In order to stop you using your own proxy that you can change the IP address of at will they'd have to set up a whitelist of approved sites the students can access and block everything else.
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beg pardon i see what he was saying now.
 
Ascendancy said:
No, he was right the first time.

In order to stop you using your own proxy that you can change the IP address of at will they'd have to set up a whitelist of approved sites the students can access and block everything else.
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but this is nearly impossible, how many websites are there, to whitelist the entire internet. the only way i could see them dealing with me connecting to an ip address, is if they disallow direct connections to ip address or using a different ip address as a proxy
 
Update: google is STILL not working block page is gone but now all i get is this

dHimF.jpg

I.T department is trolling still
 
Leprechaun312 said:
but this is nearly impossible, how many websites are there, to whitelist the entire internet. the only way i could see them dealing with me connecting to an ip address, is if they disallow direct connections to ip address or using a different ip address as a proxy
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the way internet filters work normally is have a preset database of websites. based on how the filter is set up it will allow/deny access to sites in certain preset categories. anything outside of the database it will guess based on site content and/or traffic.

which is why i dont think hosting your own proxy will work, if the filter is any good it should see that youre trying to use a proxy and will trigger the relevant policy.
 
Fluke? said:
Can you use Yahoo?
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yeah, its fine, however i can still access google by the ip address, i think they have just slipped up however i have a feeling this is going to be permanent, when trying to search using the chrome url bar it loads google as "adult material" they can't ban google surely? its google!!!!!!
 
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