Ben Hovinga

It’s late, again and I am trying to check my email but sympatico has been screwing up again. As you can see from the image here I am getting almost the equivalent of dial-up. Because most web apps are optimized for high speed connections this is starting to bother me that my email and other websites keep timing out. If I could I would get as far away from Bell as I could but my family doesn’t mind that they are getting wallet F***ed by this stupid company. Once I get my own place I wont have any Bell services. That is a guarantee.

As everyone knows April 1st is the pranksters day known as April Fools Day. April Fools Day can be quite fun. The joy of putting a fake spider on your co-workers desk, who happens to have Arachnophobia. But you need to be careful for yourself on this day of lols, mostly due to computer pranks also. April Fools is a dangerous day for computer users as it is one of the top days in the year when computer viruses are releases.

But what can you do to prevent this? Here are my top five tips:

5. Be aware of what pages you are viewing. Try not to go to any websites that you have not been to before.

4. Know who you communicate with. When using an instant messenger or checking email don’t open any links or files unless it relates to the discussed topic at hand. The person who your talking to may already have a virus that spams his/her contact list.

3. Keep updated! Check that all of your software is up to date, most updates are security fixes to prevent problems.

2. Get Protection! Make sure you have anti-virus software and that its up to date. If you don’t have any anti-virus software? Here is a free one. Just wants you to register once a year.

1. Abstinence. You can’t get infected if the computer is not on.

That’s it. Spread this around to help everyone to stay computer safe this April 1st.

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.