5 ms·

I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay. Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school adminis

I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay. Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter. We had a game design class that happened after school. Usually that period was reserved for making up classes you failed, but ROP courses that didn't align with the district's curriculum goals were taught as well. Needless to say, pretty much every resource we needed was blocked. So the teacher would give out his content filter bypass credentials, because the school wouldn't entertain any exceptions to students not being allowed to have them even though they knew there were classes on campus that would have tremendous difficulty. A couple of times a student would leak the credentials to others on campus and it'd take all of 5 minutes to get to everyone on campus via social media. They'd always treat everyone who knew the bypass accounts as "guilty unless proven otherwise". I ended up in detention a few times for even knowing it. Parents complained to the school a bunch, school just always blanket said "bypassing the content filter as a student is against policy for any reason. No exceptions." Makes me think back to 1st grade in 1999 when I was first given internet access and being told not to use Google because "it wasn't safe". Couldn't have been that bad because it took another half decade for me to inadvertently end up on the "adult" part of the internet.

riversflow 5y ago
Similar time period, I used portable Firefox and then Chrome on a thumb drive to bypass our content filter. I actually find this surprising in retrospect, but I'd guess they were using Content Advisor on Internet Explorer[1]. I carefully guarded my secret. [1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_HomeUsers.pdf https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  If I were smarter, I probably would have learned about proxy servers. I was tantalizingly close as is. I had set up port forwarding on our home router and a dyndns account to access my (Linux) desktop via ssh. I'm almost surprised it took me another few years to bump into SOCKS proxies. I already had 99% of the setup, just not the final step. Oh well I guess. Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me. Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents. High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.
  - efreak 5y ago
    No need for Firefox/chrome to "download" software, you could get a java-based file manager; this allowed browsing the filesystem and running software on the public library computers, which were far more locked down than any school computer I've ever seen (they had software to enforce 15/60 minute session limits, session reservations, etc, and group policies that disabled external storage, explorer, and the start menu; most browser functions were disabled). If you've got a Citrix-based application available, there's usually some way to trick your way into that system; in my case it was by going to file->open in the weird processor, and right-clicking it to open it in (the remote session) explorer, which had my local media mounted (flash drive), and allowed access to the remote browser. If you can get a cmd prompt, you can also sometimes get around restrictions with that, possibly by using it to open task manager. In college, these weren't locked down so much as intended to be single-purpose (for running Photoshop, etc from home), and I used similar tricks to gain access to a command prompt so I could register fonts for my projects using FontLoader[1]. Of course, despite every PC being on a domain, there was still the local administrator account, which was easily obtained by leaving an unused computer running ophcrack overnight. Eventually I found out that the roaming network administrator account password was simply ford, as the admin left a local account on a computer that wasn't networked; this pretty much lasted me through high school. For bypassing the firewalls? That was simple; I got a free shell account, and later my own server, an early openvz vps. Once I got my own server, I spent long amounts of time trying to increase the amount of RAM available to me (since it was fair-share CPU on a decent server, building and similar jobs ran far faster than my current digital ocean VPS). At this point, I found out about sshfs on my own computer, and spent ages trying to find a decently cheap Xen VPS so I could use kernel modules for sshfs and swap. Eventually, I gave up. One period of my last semester I was a TA, rarely with any work to do, so I spent most of my time on IRC and setting the wallpaper to be Cyanide & Happiness comics. /me trouts Piper around a bit with a large slap 1: this used to be available at https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader but not anymore. This might be the source, not sure. https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader
  - laurent92 5y ago
    > They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP. Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. Microsoft security baffles me. You could run Windows Update in the browser (and also antiviruses using ActiveX). Who would think of making it possible to alter the OS… from the browser?
blfr 5y ago
> Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. That sounds very big tech to me, exactly the model towards which Facebook et al. are moving.
- alar44 5y ago
  Sounds like normal best practice for a secure environment full of shitheads to me. The hell does this have to do with Facebook? What website am I on?
  - PickledHotdog 5y ago
    I think they're alluding to the "walled garden" analogy that gets bandied about in reference to "big tech"

riversflow 5y ago

Similar time period, I used portable Firefox and then Chrome on a thumb drive to bypass our content filter. I actually find this surprising in retrospect, but I'd guess they were using Content Advisor on Internet Explorer[1]. I carefully guarded my secret. [1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_HomeUsers.pdf https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...

Teknoman117 5y ago
If I were smarter, I probably would have learned about proxy servers. I was tantalizingly close as is. I had set up port forwarding on our home router and a dyndns account to access my (Linux) desktop via ssh. I'm almost surprised it took me another few years to bump into SOCKS proxies. I already had 99% of the setup, just not the final step. Oh well I guess. Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me. Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents. High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.
- efreak 5y ago
  No need for Firefox/chrome to "download" software, you could get a java-based file manager; this allowed browsing the filesystem and running software on the public library computers, which were far more locked down than any school computer I've ever seen (they had software to enforce 15/60 minute session limits, session reservations, etc, and group policies that disabled external storage, explorer, and the start menu; most browser functions were disabled). If you've got a Citrix-based application available, there's usually some way to trick your way into that system; in my case it was by going to file->open in the weird processor, and right-clicking it to open it in (the remote session) explorer, which had my local media mounted (flash drive), and allowed access to the remote browser. If you can get a cmd prompt, you can also sometimes get around restrictions with that, possibly by using it to open task manager. In college, these weren't locked down so much as intended to be single-purpose (for running Photoshop, etc from home), and I used similar tricks to gain access to a command prompt so I could register fonts for my projects using FontLoader[1]. Of course, despite every PC being on a domain, there was still the local administrator account, which was easily obtained by leaving an unused computer running ophcrack overnight. Eventually I found out that the roaming network administrator account password was simply ford, as the admin left a local account on a computer that wasn't networked; this pretty much lasted me through high school. For bypassing the firewalls? That was simple; I got a free shell account, and later my own server, an early openvz vps. Once I got my own server, I spent long amounts of time trying to increase the amount of RAM available to me (since it was fair-share CPU on a decent server, building and similar jobs ran far faster than my current digital ocean VPS). At this point, I found out about sshfs on my own computer, and spent ages trying to find a decently cheap Xen VPS so I could use kernel modules for sshfs and swap. Eventually, I gave up. One period of my last semester I was a TA, rarely with any work to do, so I spent most of my time on IRC and setting the wallpaper to be Cyanide & Happiness comics. /me trouts Piper around a bit with a large slap 1: this used to be available at https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader but not anymore. This might be the source, not sure. https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader
- laurent92 5y ago
  > They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP. Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. Microsoft security baffles me. You could run Windows Update in the browser (and also antiviruses using ActiveX). Who would think of making it possible to alter the OS… from the browser?

blfr 5y ago

> Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. That sounds very big tech to me, exactly the model towards which Facebook et al. are moving.

alar44 5y ago
Sounds like normal best practice for a secure environment full of shitheads to me. The hell does this have to do with Facebook? What website am I on?
- PickledHotdog 5y ago
  I think they're alluding to the "walled garden" analogy that gets bandied about in reference to "big tech"