I wrote about this over a year and half ago: Distributed Boing Boing, showing just how smart I really am.
See blocking people seems like a good idea in theory. Except that at first the techies can get around it, then the techies find away around it for everyone else. As Veen said, when something stands between people and their goals, they will perceive this as damage, they will find a way to route around that damage. Ok so he was talking about web design but the same principles apply.
For less than $10 for a domain, people could donate domains just as easily, far faster than they can be added to a blacklist. Hell if their is one thing spammers have proved, it's that it's easier to get around filtering than it is to filter.
Personally, I have a mac at home. When I am blocked on something, I open up a secure tunnel to my mac on port 22 or 443 and proxy via that. It just looks like secure web traffic to anyone trying trying to block me and they are non the wiser.
Why people can't leave the person responsibility of the content you look at in the hands of the person looking at the content rather than in your corporate IT department of your counties government I don't know. Guys, the internet is open, like a field. You can put a door in the field, but people will still just walk around it.
Boing Boing is now available on the sevitzdotnet work at webapps.sevitz.net/boingboing. Feast away all ye who are blocked.
File under: Horse dead, but still flogging away.
1. matthew
I’ve been following this story on BoingBoing for a good while now (hence the ‘boycott Smartfilter’ button on my blog), and the way I see it most corporations who block their employees from accessing certain sites/domains either don’t trust their employees to do the job they’re being paid for, or don’t understand what the internet actually is.
Opening a secure tunnel to your home computer and proxying via that is sadly beyond most people who want to browse a site that their (non-trusting/ignorant) bosses would rather they didn’t see, you might want to try one of your ‘definitive how-to’s on that one. Would probably get you about a kajillion hits, imho.
2. Mark
My universal solution for myself has been SSH to a FreeBSD box on port 22 and VNC to a Windows box on port 443. Pretty handy in cause I ever need to do any (very slow) graphical browsing when stuck behind a firewall.
3. seedy
meh. SSH tunnels? VNC? I used to walk to 10 miles to school in 2 foot of snow, uphill both ways. (I’m still trying to get PTunnel for win32 to play nice. ssh tunnels ain’t evading filters - they’re just good (tinfoil hat) common sense.) CD