[alexandria]

They can also be used to defeat most home blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol and Net Nanny, as well as getting around most blocking programs used in schools such as Bess, WebSENSE

I am employed at a school district that has WebSENCE filter. Got all excited thinking I could find an easier way to access ebay or whatever. Having to route thru another machine is alot harder than the way I've been doing it already sigh...

I wonder if there is a way to run a check on students, who unlike moi might have a DSL or cable connection, to see if they are exploiting the filter this way.

[plan2succeed.org]

Alexandria: Your experience with WebSENSE may be valuable in this thread. We look forward to hearing more from you on this. Now, as to "I wonder if there is a way to run a check on students, who unlike moi might have a DSL or cable connection, to see if they are exploiting the filter this way," let us take some guesses. The netstat command can be used to determine and/or monitor the status of network connections. Assuming you are a school administrator, you can determine what network commands are normal for your environment. Then you can watch for anomalous connections. Or another approach is if you have a proxy server or some way to detect what web sites people go to, see if you can detect anomalous patterns. We are not experts, but we'll bet there are ways to do this. Keyboard sniffers maybe?

By the way, we know of schools that have filters that are not really effective at all, but we believe that may be the result of pilot error. Can you share some experiences with us FReepers? One of us actually quit teaching in a school that had inadequate filters because the youngsters were accessing porn and he did not want to be involved in that, and efforts to improve the filters went unheeded.