Ben Hovinga

Our school is one of the few in Ontario that are trying to become an eco-school. We have been a silver eco-school as of last year and this year we are trying for the gold.

In Academic Resources there is a sign-in system. When you come into the room you must sign your name on the sheet. The problem with this system is that it uses a lot of paper and most of which is just thrown away. It was a teacher in AR that had the idea of having an electronic sign-in system using excel. After seeing it while he was still making it I just about cried by how difficult it would make things for entering and leaving the room. I decided that during my spare I would sit in AR and write a neat and user friendly php/mysql program on my laptop. For those that now what these are you would also know that you need a web server, I used xampp lite just because everything was in one place and I could run it from my USB drive.

Here are the functions of the sign-in system.
I had a nice looking home page that everyone would see when they go to sign-in. This page has three buttons, a door with the words sign-in below, a door with the words sign-out below, and a button almost invisible in the top right that says Administrator (need user and pass).

When a student would come in they would click on the sign-in door. They would do a search for their last name. If they are not in the list they can create their self (just first and last name). If they are in the list they would enter why they are here. Once submitted it is automatically time stamped and stored in the database.

When a student is going to leave they would click the sign-out door, find their name from the list of signed in students and sign-out. Again once submitted the sign-out time is automatically tracked and stored to the database.

Teachers could easily access all of this information and more from the administrator panel. Stuff like student list and a mass sign-out function for students who forget to sign-out (like me).

As I was working on this I was also learning more about PHP and a week of working on this went by and after I was done I showed the head of AR. She loved it and wanted it setup now. We setup a time to talk to the LAN tech to see if he can setup a computer at the door.

Here is the kicker. I never even showed him the program. As the computer was starting up I was explaining how I did it and what I used. When I told him that I used xampp lite he flipped out and said no servers even if its on a stand alone system (off the network).

So in the end I was learning against the the rules and I also wasted a week of my life.

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.