Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites
Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites – The Markup
I did IT for a school district and staying on top of proxies was a game of whack a mole. I’d do it because I was asked too, but kids will find a new proxy that works. And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
Yeah you’re asking a handful of people who split their time across multiple duties to play cat and mouse with hundreds of teens who have copious free time they can dedicate to finding new proxies.
Not to mention, all it takes is one advanced student setting up their own proxies on something like a free tier oracle cloud VPS and you’re never going to win.
My school even blocked archive.org because of this. Good luck checking like ⅛ of Wikipedia references.
I remember when I was in high school many many moons ago, my buddy set up a proxy through his own server. (This dude was a genius for a high schooler, he was MSCE+Security certified before graduating).
We thought we were hot shit. We used it for a few weeks. Then one day we got called into a meeting with the district’s IT department. Turns out they knew we were using it all along, but didn’t care because we were mostly using it to browse gaming sites. But then this dipshit kid saw us using it, copied the URL without our knowledge, and used it to browse porn. So they had to shut us down and punished us. No network access for a month. (That kid lost computer access for the rest of the semester and failed a computer class he was taking. Serves him right.)
First handful of security lessons for your MSCE friend haha.
Lol never stand between a teen and their smut. It is a losing battle.
Some kids will find proxies. Definitely not enough that need things like the suicide prevention sites.
It should not be on the kids to do it in the first place.
They have lots of time and motivation, as well as zero shits to give about getting caught. It's Actually a pretty good thing that kids are trying to bypass security because it naturally teaches them problem solving in a novel way
And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
I watched a really great documentary about the game Oregon Trail, and one of the first bug fixes they needed to add was preventing kids from putting in a negative number when purchasing things which resulted in an infinite money glitch. The developer was amused that the kids figured this out.
I also learned that Prince was in the same middle school where the alpha version of the game was tested in 1972, which is pretty neat.
Survey data show how these inequities play out. The Center for Democracy and Technology asked teachers last year whether internet filtering and blocking can make it harder for students to complete assignments. Among teachers in schools with high rates of poverty, 62 percent said yes; among teachers in schools with lower rates, 50 percent said the same.
So neither students nor teachesr like it?
Most education boards are about politics,not education
In my school in Germany, all computers were always set up in a way such that the teacher could look at any screen immediately. If a minor accesses a porn site, they’ll tell you by giggling, so what’s the need for filtering, anyway?
The US education system is a complete trainwreck. The teachers are underpaid to the point it should be criminal, and as a consequence many of the teachers are also poorly educated themselves and a lot of them are also technically illiterate as a consequence. IT departments are also underfunded, and what technical training and support they should be providing to teachers often doesn't happen. This isn't universal of course, there are highly educated and technically literature teachers, but they're few and far between.
Even worse the invasion of school boards by both the MAGA cult and Karens has turned schools into political battlegrounds where oftentimes the most successful teachers aren't the ones who are skilled at teaching, but the ones who are best at politicking and sucking up to administration.
But funding them better would require cutting the military budget by 0.1%!
They're actually doing more than that in U.S. schools. My daughter typed something on her school notebook in elementary school and it alerted the administration due to a keyword. I'm actually glad it did in that case because it led to some necessary follow-ups by us (no, she was not going to shoot up the school), but it still disturbed me that they were able to do that at all.
My school in the US had that too, but I don't think any of the teachers even knew about it because they never used it.
The thing with filtering porn is that it does not work. Full stop. DuckDuckGo proxies images served in the image results, and startpage has a literal webpage proxy. Not to mention the Internet Archive.
They've been doing this since the 2000s. I remember having to set up a proxy server at home just so I could connect to it and actually browse the Internet at school without every third site being blocked for no reason.
I just used sketchy Chinese websites designed for bypassing the Chinese firewall
Seems safe
-1000社会信用点数
My favorite solution was translating the website in Google translate
This is what happens when the schools are so broke that instead of getting proper IT they have to get the cheapest blocker possible and then just dial up the blocking to 11.
Censored education. Nothing bad ever happened because of that...
Same old same old. I remember back when some schools blocked Wikipedia article on Dick Chaney. Why the porn blocker would block any url with dick in it.
Missouri wanted those sites blocked, and the kids who are now vulnerable to suicide are the kind those people don’t want living anyway.
Fuck MISERY!
They also block adblockers (at least in my area). So I'm trying to find a good laptop for my sister to use next year.
In case it helps you, I've found that the uMatrix extension has been a great way to auto-block all Javascripts while still being able to permit just the ones needed to work past a site or network's limitations.
There's a little bit of a learning curve at first, but nothing too bad. Using the extension also feels empowering, because it gives you much more control than just a flat 'block everything' anti-ad approach.
No the thing is, the school district in my area uses Chromebooks and they're locked down to the point you can't download extensions or use another browser.
I didn't think I needed "protection" from anything on the Internet at all when I was a minor.
My stance has not changed merely because I am no longer personally affected. I still think that it is completely stupid to want to keep any information at all from young people in the first place.
