Johnny = Trend Setting Geek

Posted by Johnny at 10:57 a.m.

If you're bored, read this article entitled, "Kids outsmart Web filters" on CNET.

Summary: Some schools suck because they censor the Internet. Geeky kids who go to these schools discover ways of getting around the filters, mostly via web proxies. One such kid sets up a proxy on his home computer. He didn't face disciplinary action (what a twist), but they tracked his IP and prevented access to the proxy (bastards!).

This is what I found interesting about the article:

"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.

Hot new trend?

Anybody who attended a Calgary high school in the very late 90's - early 00's will probably remember BESS (the Ban Everything Site Sieve (not actual acronym)). This was a device the CBE employed in order to prevent perverts like me from surfing porn at school. I believe the system used some kind of blacklist/whitelist + very primitive filtering mechanism to determine which sites were worthy of "innocent" eyes.

Unfortunately, BESS sucked balls big time. If you needed to research the sexual habits of the common slug, GOOD LUCK! Even the word "sex" would promptly cause BESS to prevent access to a site, thus censoring all the sexual education available on the Internet. It wasn't just sex-related stuff either. Anything that had swearing, mature content, or pretty much any useful content was blocked.

For the first half of grade 10, I tried fruitlessly to guess the BESS administrator password so that I could disable it when I needed to. This was pointless. In the 2nd half, however, I suddenly became brilliant. I set up a Red Hat Linux 5.2 server on my home machine, downloaded a simple perl CGI web proxy script, and memorized my IP Address.

I went to school the next day and did a demonstration for my Computer Science teacher, Mr. Brown, who also despised BESS. I found a site on the Internet that was blocked by BESS, surfed to my home machine, entered the URL, and magically displayed the blocked content. Hurah! Suck on it, BESS! And the hot "new" trend of today was started ... 6 years earlier.

They ended up removing BESS the following year, so I could finally get rid of RH5.2, which sucked balls as well. The school board replaced the behemoth with the honour system, which worked much better in my opinion.