Is it just me or are things like this one of the dumbested ideas ever?

Because people make proxy sites to get around it, and then it ends up the employees/students who are dead set on getting to the "time-waster"/not acceptable website, waste more time trying to get around the restriction than they would if wasted on the site had the restriction not been there.

What are your guys opinions?

My school literally banned almost everything on the internet. Including Wikipedia.... Wikipedia? Really? oh and any images (such as google or yahoo). I do agree with your statement. And when the students get caught they get in a lot of trouble. It's just not worth the time or effort. Just wait to get home. It's only the internet...

Well I think employers/school's are well within their rights to have them on their computers. It serves a purpose to not only keep people productive (which while at work or school, using work or school equipment you should be) but also to protect the equipment from the malicious content of certain websites. I remember when our library was off limits to all students after a few people got past restrictions and infected computers with malware. Which meant that until they had been fixed the computers where off limits to students, which really isn't fair considering that alot of people have exams/coursework and not every one has access to a computer with the internet. .

Ahh, the days of surf control.

Someone at my school actually put Halo 1 on our public drive and everyone in the school was playing DM. :thumbsup:

After that ended, people just started downloading emulators and bringing them in.

The school filter has directly interfered with my academic success by doing this.

"Need quick easily accessible information? BAM I BANNED WIKIPEDIA!

Need a picture for your power point you teacher is making you work on in class? Well you have to use crappy Microsoft clip art, because google images is blocked!

You mad, Comrade?"

So because of censorship, I had a poorly informed and terribly illustrated power point that counted as a test grade.

Eh, it's not a big deal once you get the password to the filter .

Whose palms do I need to grease for this?

Our filter mostly goes after sites cataloged as containing malware, as well as social networking and video gaming sites.

While I am guilty bypassing the filter on occasion ( ), I don't blame employers for trying to prevent their employees from goofing off. If you were an owner you wouldn't want your bandwidth being wasted on some guy downloading movies or music all day.

One of my college courses had to be held at a high school (teachers ed and everyone was already at the school site so rather go back to the university we stayed at the high school) and there was an incident with the schools proxy.

We couldn't access ours schools website so we couldn't get to the professors lesson so we cut class short for the night :laugh:

These forums aren't banned so I'm good.

go ahead and have them, because you can create an admin account with the command prompt in about 5 seconds. Its very basic to do and anyone who wanted could be an admin very quickly. Ive done it several times to make minor tweaks to cosmetics or to download a better browser on school computers. If your sitting at a computer (as opposed to remote access) its pretty damn hard to be restricted if you dont want to be.

They're evolving! THE STUDENTS ARE EVOLVING! THEY'VE BREACHED THE RESTRICTIONS!!!!

Proxy sites would be constantly blocked but we kept hitting them with more. Filters were dumb at our school, since nearly everything was blocked.

My school was pretty much the same way. I wonder when schools will figure out that students won't need ways to bypass the restrictions if they'd quit blocking sites that are needed for schoolwork.

Remember the good old days where there was a thing called books, and those books were housed in a building called a library?

If you are caught using a proxy site in our school, supposedly you get expelled. So, no one uses them anymore for fear of being expelled (doubt you do but it's not a risk I'd take, considering when I get home I have access to any website I want).

I filter our Internet at my work. The filter is mostly for malware and junk, don't block facebook otherwise I'd have an angry mob on my hand. Proxies are all blocked, or at least everyone that OpenDNS knows of.

The fact is, social networks are a honeypot of malware and svck up precious bandwidth. The IT staff has a duty to protect the equipment and maintain a productive environment. I totally understand the desire to ban social network sites, and am 100% for at least basic Internet filtering at work as a layer of protection.

When I was at school about 3 years ago we had a pretty strict filter. Those of us who had laptops brought in $20 a month internet modems and we set them up and we could watch or look at whatever we wanted on our laptops.

Every filter I've ever had at work or uni:

*http://www.facebook.com*

This website is blocked blah blah blah...

*https://www.facebook.com*

Welcome to Facebook!

My school did this too, it didn't last long.
I found that once a popular proxy got blocked everyone would be using the schools email system to ask around for others and/or they would shout it across the class, half the time an I.T tech or teacher was present and it was like a light bulb went off in their head "Oh! Is that so...Blocked", given 10 mins you'd hear everyone shouting that the site is blocked as well and they all start baying for more proxies while the techs and teachers sit them whacking the block button.
My IT teacher was great though, he was the head of the department and just never gave a [censored], he would let you do anything you wanted aslong as you listened when he spoke. If someone never paid attention everyone would feel his wrath *Block* *Block* *Block* *Block*, it went something like that, he would unblock those who did listen eventually though.

I also remember when people were given a reasonable amount of time to write papers; say, months of time for a lengthy paper. Now? You're given a couple weeks WHILE you're still piled with other homework.

So this "good ol' days" bit would be fine if, y'know, you got the whole package. Instead, as ease and speed of access has increased, so have the expectations. In the end, it doesn't get any easier.

I have NEVER borrowed a book from the library for uni work these past 3 years.

Quick internet information >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> having to go to the library.

2011: 1
Old days: 0

As long as I've been using computers at school there has been no restrictions. At best the teacher has a program which allowed him/her to see what we are doing, to monitor us effectively.

When I started high school there were no rules about computer usage until the entire libraries, labs, and career centres were flooded with people playing MUDs, Doom, Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triads, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and so on, many of them networked games. Then they instituted a proxy and file management system that whitelisted applications and blacklisted certain websites users could use. Of course, in all their brilliance, they overlooked a rather huge hole. Netscape was the most common browser at the time, they couldn't get around the fact that Windows svcked (and still does) for security, and that Netscape developers allowed the person to direct the browser where the telnet executed app would point to, so it was all a matter of inserting a Doom install disc, saving it to the student access network drive, pointing Netscape's telnet program execution to the Doom executable file, and typing "telnet://" into the browser and bam. Not even a full day or two after installing this system did all of our friends know how to circumvent it, and eventually they had to just seriously monitor people's usage with sign-in sheets and such. This all preceded the type of OS/network protection seen today. It was back when one could implement a simple qbasic program to run on a loop with flashing background and simple DOS-like font saying "YOU HAVE A VIRUS PLEASE SHUT DOWN ALL COMPUTERS" with the internal speaker blaring a loud alarm-like sound when there was a substitute teacher for any given computer class to get the rest of class off.

Sufficed to say, paying for all of this stupid software is a waste compared to actually paying attention to what students are doing. My old college did a fine job using a program that just reverts itself (like a system restore/ghost) every time someone reboots their machine and placing work-study students there to help other students with stuff on a regular basis. Being in charge of an entire college lab for a couple months, it wasn't a hard concept.

At our school you can't even use the Run program or the Command Prompt.