Web Filters
 

Okay, so my school has recruited me to see what ways I can come up with to get around the Internet filters they have installed, so they can try to fix it, they are using Barracuda Web Filter and I need to think of ways to get around it. Any ideas?
I am a tech help person at my school and I am testing and trying to debug the laptops that we will be getting. Sort of a preemptive strike against the idiots who'll say "ma computers jacked up, fix it" and the intelligent people who will try to find ways around the Filters.

Also if this is seems too much like hacking feel free to close the thread.

If it's stopping anyone from responding, if you're willing to trust me I guess, I can confirm that he is, indeed, a student tech helper person thing and that he has been assigned to try to get around protections and blocks on the laptops that will be given to us in the near future.

On that note, he already knows what I have to say about hte subject and I'm just throwing that out there to anyone who might think this is just a noobliness comin' in and tryin' to jack up all on the school computers 'n' stuff.

Honestly try to only find the really obvious ones, tis a cruelty to take away from your fellow students the ability to abuse the system. Unless of course you want to be known as the Benedict Arnold of your student body, and we all know what happened to that fucker...

Well yeah, of course.

Keep the smart things to your friends and give away the obvious ones that the slightly less computer-competent people that one may or may not like will try to use. >.>

I'd leave out the Babelfish route, its the easiest one I know of.

Well I tried the Babelfish way, it works on the laptops we will be getting but not on the regular computers. Thanks for the help, all I was trying to find was the really obvious ways around the filter. My teacher knows about it so I assume that it will end up blocked soon enough. Next I will need to work on some more complicated methods, but I think that I will leave that to other people.

Proxy server in the browser which bypasses the barracuda (poor baby, I love those boxes) Or you could pull the ultimate dick card and just VPN out of the school network into another network which has split tunneling turned off (hairpin technology required for use) and just ride their internet pipe. *caveat* this does requite IPSEC over TCP connectivity configured to use an open egress port from your originating network *hint* try 110 =)

I hate to say this, but when I was in high school, all you had to do was type in the site in the address bar to get access to "blocked" sites. Or maybe the IP address. I forget. I'd worry less about the IP address, as few people in high school know the ones to sites they shouldn't be looking at.


Other than that, all I can think of is taking the most popular sites the school wants blocked and shutting down everything for those specific cases, then applying more general actions to everything else.


I'm sorry, but networking isn't my area of knowledge, so advice is really all I have to offer.

Sometimes just changing http to https in the address bar got me through our school's filter.

Not always applicable as the majority of websites dont have 443 access unless they do something which requires secure login methods...Though a lot of place do anymore, so I guess it is a crapshoot