why do colledges block sites- it's beyond me!

[the masked depressant]

okay, i kind of understand.. because they don't want students to access stuff they shouldn't... but still, is it right to block stuff like youtube?. even some educational websites where you actually need to get too can be blocked sometimes- i was trying earlier to get on the website for bbc bite size- blocked!

i swear, administrators need to stop blocking random stuff.. and only block what they need to

 

[FBD]

my uni blocks some random sites too, not youtube thou...they blocked collegehumor and juicycampus...which i can see being blocked just because. well not so much college humor but juicy campus i understand since its a site where college students can go and basically ruin peoples lives with what they say about other people.

youre right thou, a lot of sites dont need to be blocked, youtube doesnt make a ton of sense and anything thats needed for classes and stuff def shouldnt be blocked

 

[MLKane]

It's the system they use to block stuff, are all sites not frequently used by students blocked? e.g. webcomics, gnu, forums, something which isn't a game but isn't educational? if so then they might be using an inclusion blocker, which means that you can only visit sites on a list determined by your administrator. nothing you can do about that. However if specific things are banned, for example websites which contain the word porn, or game, or gun etc, then this is an exclusion block. This means you can visit any site except those on the college list. If this is the case then you can often get around the block by either setting up a mirror server you can access remotely, although this takes some pretty in depth technical knowhow to get right, or if you know what the web address for the site you want to use is then you can use HTTPS. To do this just go the the web address in question, but instead of "http://www.example.com/lolcats" or whatever, you type in "https://www.example.com/lolcats" which produces a secure connection, which although it must be renewed on each new page is mostly secure form interferance by admins or admin programs.

and just as a side note, this should probably be in soap box, not in emotional support

 

[Mr Stewart]

Weird. I didn't know some campuses did that. Mine certainly didn't.

You can use a proxy to access blocked sites if you like. There's plenty of free ones out there, just google. That is, unless "proxy" is on the exclusion list.

 

[Monoka]

i discovered this site isnt blocked in school but was flagged up and i got asked some questions :-/ luckly i didnt log on at the time so i brushed it off as 'wondered what it was'.

oops

 

[Riley]

3 ways around

- go through a proxy
- get IP address of website e.g youtube's is 74.125.232.98 (type into URL)
- create a free website and embed youtube videos onto it such as webs.com

There are more but try these