Beating Big Brother - Bypass those content filters...
I'm sure many of you work in places where you might have some, lets say... "overly aggressive" administrators, or egomaniacal over-controlling managers / executives within your organization or IT department. This is always a bummer to me because it just sends the WRONG message to your employees. I don't condone surfing the web and wasting your company's time on looking at porn or other unproductive sites, but there are many legit websites that happen to get filtered out by these overly aggressive content filtering systems. They tend to filter out sites like bisonium.com and techmeme.com because it classifies them as "discussion forums." Well, there's some brilliant thinking if I have ever seen some. Lets block news sites, forums and blogs where people might be talking about something useful.
So for those of you stuck in Content Filtering Hell, I'm here to restore your God given rights to freedom of information. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, but generally speaking, it all boils down to using a remote proxy service to conceal your activities and bypass content filters and firewalls within your organization.
*** DISCLAIMER ***
This is not intended for you to use this in any way which will abuse or violate your company policies. Take the following with grain of salt and be SMART about how you do this. As a general rule of thumb, it's against most company policies to circumvent protective measures they have put in place, or to tinker with system settings unless otherwise told. However, if you have your own personal computer or are in a public place with your laptop and find yourself needing access beyond the filters, this is for you.
A good primer and simple way to set this up can be found here: http://www.buzzsurf.com/surfatwork. If for some reason that isn't good enough, or you wanna really geek out hard, there are plenty of alternatives. A few you can start with are by using widely available and free tools such as TOR, Vidalia and JAP. These tools in conjunction with a little know-how, and some free open proxies throughout the world, should get you up and running in no time. I wont bore you with all the details on setting this up, most of you will probably be able to figure that out using the websites I listed above, and the setup will vary according to your system.
I believe people should be treated as adults in the workplace. Until proven otherwise, there shouldn't be restriction to the free flow of information. There are always going to be cases where you need to censor content, but it can be done without disrupting the workplace and causing resentment among your employees. Management needs to think wisely before implementing such Gestapo tactics. Hopefully you don't work in such an environment, but as we all know...life isn't always perfect. Rock on and HACK THE PLANET! :-)
Technorati Tags: Big Brother, Censorship, Security, Tech Tips
