Censorship
By Travis MacDonald
Have you ever tried to go onto a favorite site and it was censored? If you ever wanted to go onto a shopping site to get a present for your family or friends you couldn’t do it. The system that the school uses is a special box that regulates the websites called a fire wall which is mainly used for businesses to help keep the workers on track and stop spies from relaying information. Our school uses this to try and keep the students off of game sites and non-appropriate sites, but many of our students have found ways around this Sonic Wall. The computer security isn’t able to keep up with the knowledge of the students. I will only give away a couple of the tricks students know. One favorite way is to use a proxy site to bypass the Sonic Wall altogether. A proxy site is a type of internet program that you can use. What it does is reroute your website address through a “proxy” server, which is just someone else’s computer, and lets you bypass the Sonic Wall. The staff has tried to stop the proxy site usage but has failed many, many times, because we use another program to bypass the security for the proxy sites. The way some bypass the other security for proxy sites is to ping the web site address. What this does is transfer the normal wording of the website into a number format that the internet recognizes as the same address. Another popular way is to just completely stop using blocked sites and use other site with the same stuff. Like if one game site is blocked there is always another site with the same games. Another one I have heard of is a way to directly disconnect a computer from the Sonic Wall. There are many more ways that students do know but these are the most popular.
