My School Internet

chrislusty · 7 Jul 2006 at 08:55

Working as an IT Technician in a school, ours is blocked by the council, which uases Synamtec Web Security.

Some times threads in these forums are blokced, others arent. Any sensitve, words found in any website are blocked. And some times sites are blocked for no apparent reason :rolleyes:

but its for the protection of the pupils so cant complain.

Gaverick · 13 Jul 2006 at 18:09

anysite.webhop.org

Borris · 13 Jul 2006 at 18:10

chrislusty said:
Any sensitve, words found in any website are blocked.

Like nipples?

Naked?

Arse?

cdcopyman · 13 Jul 2006 at 19:13

fuzzcocks

Trifid · 13 Jul 2006 at 19:51

Be pleased, our school has to pay stupid amounts for their internet which comes ready blocked (more than a standard buisness line.) I went to talk about the admins about it and the only reason they are still on this line is because the email address provided by the council is with this ISP, and so any other ISP will not be suitable. I use my proxy for stupid blocked sites which will be useful but the problem is it goes on unsuitable word count which is like 2 slightly iffy words and it gets blocked.

For the record it is e2bn.

Chris1712 · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:07

Neon said:
you are so full of ****.

used a key logger on a school computer, i highly doubt it.

and how? flash drive? cdrom drive? i think someone is lying.

100% truth mate, used a usb flash drive to get it on there while the teacher was out of room, restarted the pc and he logged on obviously! Ding dang do!

Got shatty-fatmas AND Zefan to back me up because they were there so smd. And FYI i wanted the admin password because its something to do! Taking stuff apart and farting around is incredibly fun and is a bit of a challenge for when your bored!

Raumarik · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:11

chrislusty said:
Working as an IT Technician in a school, ours is blocked by the council, which uases Synamtec Web Security.

Some times threads in these forums are blokced, others arent. Any sensitve, words found in any website are blocked. And some times sites are blocked for no apparent reason but its for the protection of the pupils so cant complain.

Same system we use, well did as it's finally being replaced in a few weeks hopefully with something that integrates with active directory!

Zefan · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:16

Chris1712 said:
Got shatty-fatmas AND Zefan to back me up

Damn right you have. Actually scratch shatty, because he's hardly ever here. Excuse the way Chris1712 may have sounded a little "Hi, I'm leet", but he was drunk when he posted. Yep, he did get the damn password, and it was ROFL. We were doing an IT GNVQ and it was quite possibly the most stupidly boring dire thing ever - "Write a memo". Clearly this wasn't enough for us so we went a'hackin.

Trigger · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:19

Energize said:
I bet it doesn't help if you use your home pc as a proxy with a dynamic ip address like I did. And I wasn't actually breaking any agreement because I never signed one.

Haha, guess again

The moment you log onto a school PC, you accept the usage policy.

And for those of you using keyloggers and the like, well that's just childish to be honest isn't it really? The school comuters are put there for your benefit and the restrictions imposed on the network are put there for both the school's safety and yours. Stealing passwords and running your own software really questions whether you should be allowed to use the school computers at all, and then you wonder why we place so many restrictions on them :cool:

Al Vallario · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:21

Zefan said:
Damn right you have. Actually scratch shatty, because he's hardly ever here. Excuse the way Chris1712 may have sounded a little "Hi, I'm leet", but he was drunk when he posted. Yep, he did get the damn password, and it was ROFL. We were doing an IT GNVQ and it was quite possibly the most stupidly boring dire thing ever - "Write a memo". Clearly this wasn't enough for us so we went a'hackin.

Chris1712 said:
100% truth mate, used a usb flash drive to get it on there while the teacher was out of room, restarted the pc and he logged on obviously! Ding dang do!

Got shatty-fatmas AND Zefan to back me up because they were there so smd. And FYI i wanted the admin password because its something to do! Taking stuff apart and farting around is incredibly fun and is a bit of a challenge for when your bored!

He's obviously still drunk.

Zefan · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:24

Al Vallario said:
He's obviously still drunk.

Leave him alone, he doesn't post often

Behemoth · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:32

In my last year of college our internet was unfiltered, but if you got caught doing something you shouldn't be looking at then be prepared to face the consequences, which I think is fair enough.

Just a note to some of the younger guys really that are still in school, these filters are in place to protect you from the nasty men with the gas masks, and although it may seem fun to try and find a way round these protection meassures, the only people you are harming are really yourselves. I'm sure your parents would really like to know that instead of doing work, your trying to hack MI5 instead from your schools connection.

Also it's not fun for the guys that run your ICT departments either, they have to spend hours sometimes clearing up the mess that you lot leave behind, and they don't want to filter your access either, but at the end of the day when your in school, college whatever if you don't agree with the terms set out in your IT department, then don't use the system, it's as simple as that really.

I'm not exactly a saint myself when I was at school, I tried to find ways around the filtering systems, but you always got caught in the end, it was never worth getting in trouble for either.

When I was in 6th form at school, I used to help run our network, I remember when 1 kid, I forget what he was called managed to infect the entire network with the win32 CIH virus, it took a week to get the system working properly again

Sorry I'll get off my soap box bow, I just find it annoying when I see threads like this.

Sp00n · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:44

Scansafe @ work

Zefan · 13 Jul 2006 at 20:48

Behemoth said:
it was never worth getting in trouble for either.

We never got in trouble as old accounts from years back were still allowed access (My sisters), it was just ROFL being able to exploit the inadequacy of the admins. If they weren't incompetent, we wouldn't have done it.

Jotun · 13 Jul 2006 at 21:02

Back when I was at school, we couldn't access http://www.electronicsexplained.co.uk/ because it contains the term sex in the URL.

Trigger · 13 Jul 2006 at 21:29

Behemoth said:
*snip*

Pretty much what I was trying to say but a much better way of putting it

Basically, the network is there for your benefit so enjoy using it, don't try and 'hack' it. The kids at our school can get quite nasty when they find they can't do something or the favourite website has been blocked, they don't seem to see that the restrictions are in place for their protection.

The problem with the internet is though that as soon as we block a site which is 'unsuitable' for education, they will find another one just like it two days later. The way I can see it going is having websites whitelisted instead of blacklisted. Infact, I know of a few schools who have done this and don't even allow access to search engines etc.

Behemoth · 13 Jul 2006 at 22:09

Trigger said:
Pretty much what I was trying to say but a much better way of putting it

Basically, the network is there for your benefit so enjoy using it, don't try and 'hack' it. The kids at our school can get quite nasty when they find they can't do something or the favourite website has been blocked, they don't seem to see that the restrictions are in place for their protection.

The problem with the internet is though that as soon as we block a site which is 'unsuitable' for education, they will find another one just like it two days later. The way I can see it going is having websites whitelisted instead of blacklisted. Infact, I know of a few schools who have done this and don't even allow access to search engines etc.

Pleased that someone agrees with me.

Like I said I'm no saint, but half the stuff I've seen in this thread, well we would never have dreamed of ever doing. The thing we got into the biggest amount of trouble for was making a chat program in visual basic.

At the end of the day all this nice equipment that the kids get to use are paid for buy the working classes e.g the tax payer. When these guys get jobs and join the real world they'll understand, well I hope so anyway.

MoNkeE · 13 Jul 2006 at 22:15

Behemoth said:
Like I said I'm no saint, but half the stuff I've seen in this thread, well we would never have dreamed of ever doing. The thing we got into the biggest amount of trouble for was making a chat program in visual basic.

Ahh, but there's the difference. What you did was geeky, but respectable.

All they did was download a key-stroke logger and un-wittingly tricked someone into disclosing the admin password.

OMG HOW KEWL IS THT LOLOLOL

-RaZ

Energize · 7 Sep 2006 at 18:18

Tbh the admins at my old school preferred it when people did something bad to the network, it gave them something to do instead of sitting around all day.

Burnsy2023 · 7 Sep 2006 at 18:41

Trigger said:
Is your school internet supplied by your LEA though? We have two 'levels' of blocking- county filter websites at their end using surf control and then we can also filter what we want at our end now using ISA Server which we've found much better than surf control- awful program Obviously though we can't allow access to something county have blocked as their end is separate from ours

Surfcontrol is a very powerful program when used properly.

I'm an IT techy at a Secondry School and we have two levels of filteration like Trigger.

We have Websense installed at the LEA and we have Surfcontrol inhouse on an ISA server.

Firstly, I am very harsh with people who try and cerumvent security measures that are for our pupils benifit. We have the real time monitor on the server always up and we monitor usage closely. We have about 900 pupils; thats low enough to know who the techncially minded are and who is most likely to try and use proxies etc.

You can't get around our proxy as its a totally separate virtual network (thanks Cisco) and you just can't get any conectivity without it.

If I see anyone looking for games or porn you will be banned for a minimum of 8 weeks, your parents notified. When you ban expires, we print out weekly reports of your usage for the next 4 or so months, just to make sure.

It is there for your benifit more then anything else. I do, however, try and make sure we don't block silly sites like Wikipedia, or Google Images.

However, we have no control of sites blocked by our LEA, which is very annoying when they block the AVG update site and the Windows Onecare site :mad:

Burnsy