Ben Hovinga

If you are like me, Canadian and a Web Geek, you have noticed that all of the good Internet content is available to the US only. Some examples of this are Hulu.com, Zune Marketplace, Netflix, and Pandora are just to name a few. If you go to any of these sites from within Canada the site will try to detect your IP address and reference it to a GeoIP program. If the program tells the site that you are not from the US they will block you out.

But WHY???

If these sites did not have the GeoIP program they would not know where you are from and would let everyone into the site. Also if they did not get the GeoIP program they would get a big Federal charge against them because of Copyright Laws. You see all of the content on the site is licenced for use inside the US only and can be a pain to re-licence all of the content for all other countries. So in all laziness and confusion they won’t.

I have yet to hear of any website that blocks content from Canada to the US. I think someone should start a web company like the ones listed above and block out only the US and let other counties enjoy the content.

Sure enough just after I posted my previous post my blog was blocked as you can see from this screen shot. I can still access the admin side of things to post new things but the main part of the site is blocked.

It is content like this that will get my blog blocked at my school but I need to tell you anyway.

There are a bunch of ways to get around your school or workplace firewall, some work and others do not. The most basic of them all is to use what is called a proxy bypass website. This is a website that encrypts the URL of the website you are visiting and displays the page in your web browser. The downside to this is the website that you need to use may already be blocked and 90% of the time the page is not being displayed the right way.

The next way you can bypass the firewall is to use a portable web browser. Portable FireFox is a free portable version of the popular browser FireFox. All you need to do is install this program on your USB flash drive and run it off of that. All of your settings are saved to the folder that it was installed and it will not require one computer to run. Because most schools and workplaces just use Internet explorer they also setup the proxy settings in the settings of Internet Explorer. Because FireFox will not use a proxy by default it will skip the proxy server and go strait to the Internet. This can also make browsing faster because it is not waisting time going through the server.

Sometimes not even FireFox will work on the most harsh of network firewalls. In cases like this you are basically screwed.

Last year my media studies teacher wanted to do a small Internet assignment involving a video from YouTube. Little did she know that YouTube was on the inappropriate for school list and was blocked. After being embarrassed for a whole of five minutes, she told the class to pack their stuff up and go back to the class. I told her to hold off for another minute or two. That whole time that she was trying to get the website to work and failing I was actually succeeding in that task. I put a copy of portable FireFox in the class folder and told the class to use that instead of Internet Explorer. Because FireFox was not setup to use a proxy at all you could access any website you wanted. After that class I got called down to the office to get my computer privleges revoked for a week for finding a way around the school blocker and another week of detentions for telling the students in my class. It would have been more if my media teacher did not stand up for me and explain why I did what I did.

This year the school got a new proxy blocker that is actually board wide. This new proxy is setup through hardware not software like the old one and now FireFox is just another tool to view a red screen that says blocked.

Over the cource of the semester I have been making attemps to bypass it, coming close a few times but in the end all failures. The way I have been attempting is by use of a program that can be installed on a USB drive like FireFox was. Many people ask why I don’t just use a proxy website like the rest of students wanting to use facebook. I just tell them, “Because those websites can be blocked and they never display the page 100% as you would see it at home.” My theaory is to get a program to encrypt what I am sending and tunnle through to my computer at home, use my home internet connection to get the site and send it all back encrypted again.

But why do schools and organizations block all of these websites? Tony makes several good points in his article Blocking students on school network is wrong.