By Stefanie
Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: April 19, 2006 4:00 AM PST
http://news.com.com/Kids+outsmart+Web+filters/2009-1041_3-6062548.html
Last November, Ryan, a
high-school sophomore, figured out a way to outsmart the Web filters on a
school PC in order to visit the off-limits MySpace.com while doing
"homework" in the computer lab.
A teacher eventually spotted the social network on the
screen in front of "Ryan," a fictitious name for a real student
attending school in Phoenix, Ore., a small town with a population of about
5,000. The teacher flagged the activity for the school's technology expert, who
then followed Ryan's tracks online through the school network.
Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his
home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for
banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the
school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that
allow users to access other sites through them.)
"I eventually tracked down the (Internet Protocol)
address, so that it doesn't work for him anymore," said Don Wolff, tech
coordinator in the Phoenix-Talent School District, adding that Ryan didn't face
disciplinary action. "It's against our acceptable-use policy, but he's not
going to quit trying, (and this way) we can keep learning."
"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting
around Web filters," Wolff said.
"It's going
to be the constant battle. No matter what you put up, kids are going to work
around it."
-- Lynn Beebe, school counselor
Web proxies are almost as old as the Internet itself as a
means to route Web traffic through an anonymous domain name or circumvent
content-filters, and they've long been the territory of corporate networks and
the tech savvy seeking privacy.
Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs
to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on
the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering
technology providers.
Proxies are just one of many tricks that kids
use to break locks put on forbidden material--a pursuit of almost any young
generation. As more schools place tight controls on PCs to stop kids from
file-sharing, instant messaging, social networking or looking at undesirable
material online, the kids are getting more clever, tech experts say.
Google, by far the most popular search site, has a
"safe search" feature, for example, that filters out adult material.
But kids can circumvent those filters by viewing "cached" links or
thumbnail images to look at inappropriate material, experts say. Teens also
trick filters by typing in misspelled words or modern slang to retrieve links
to racy material. Translation sites Babelfish or Google Translate can deliver
sites like Playboy.com translated from another language.
"It's going to be the constant battle. No matter
what you put up, kids are going to work around it," said Lynn Beebe, a
school counselor in Scotts Valley, Calif. Her school, for example, uses filters
to block all sites with the word or subject "blog," in addition to
other sites.
But there's no foolproof solution. Beebe said that a
small population of boys at the school use their free time to play games
online. Sometimes they've shared with her that when they mistakenly type in a
URL, an undesirable site appears, she said.
A more popular avenue for teens on school PCs is to visit
any one of thousands of Web proxy sites such as Proxify, Guardster.com and Proxy.org to call up banned sites without notice, according
to filtering companies.
Kevin Sanders, senior software engineer at Lightspeed
Systems, maker of a content-filtering system called Total Traffic Control, said
he targets such proxy sites in a master database of thousands of barred sites
for school clients.
Proxies can get trickier.
"A far more difficult problem to deal with is when
they download a piece of software on their home computer, using a CGI script to
(access content). Our product doesn't recognize it as a known domain, because
it's just going through their home computer," said Sanders.
Web sites like Freeproxy point visitors to many free downloadable
applications like "Hidemyass.com" that let kids work around content
filters in a more surreptitious way. Teen blogs can also be found that point kids to proxies for
school filters.
How to deal with it? "We block all requests going to
unknown sites," Sanders said. Lightspeed keeps a database of roughly 2
million recognized sites categorized in groups like News, Adult or Violence.
School clients or administrators of the product can limit access so kids can
access only acceptable categories such as News or Education. For Sanders, if a
site goes unrecognized, he simply bans it.
"We also have a new feature coming out very soon
which will allow us to dynamically detect the use of CGI-based proxies and
block that session and send a notification to the network administrator,"
said Sanders.
Send insights or tips on this topic to stefanie.olsen@cnet.com.