In case you wanted to know what websites the Indianpolis public school system blocks

It's not China. Not quite.

You can get Delawareliberal, the Boston Tea Party, and even Just a Girl in Short Shorts, but you cannot check your email, use Google Images, or visit Outright Libertarians.

You can't go on eBay.

You can, however (just checking) backdoor your way into dozens of very, shall we say, explicit sites.

But you can also access Delaware Libertarian, or else you wouldn't be reading this.

This is a common phenomenon: schools with heavily but stupidly gated internet access (and this one has, believe it or not, a 121-digit password).

You can get into chat rooms as long as you dummy in through at least three different sites.

What is the point?

Comments

Anonymous said…

Check out Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" if you want to read a fun story based on this sort of thing - the hero is a student in such a "locked down" High School environment who gets into a tiff with the DHS bozos. It tends to be a bit heavy on the technology side, but it's a good primer on how to deal with firewalls and school "censorware" type programs.

Bottom line is those programs only stop the non-computer literate, such as the School Committees that implement such dumb ideas...

ART

October 7, 2008 at 1:28 AM

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