Divine Lunacy

Filtering internet content serves two purposes: It keeps blood-thirsty lawyers off the schools back, and it makes the school eligible for additional funding. I have previously blogged about how exploitable the schools filters are (manufactured by: 8e6); today we add another chapter to our book of exploits.

Google Talk has been around for a while now, though with the recent additions to gmail, many people are just realizing that they’ve been able to use their gmail addresses as jabber accounts for all these months. Perhaps the school (or those persons who update the master blacklist) have come to the same realization. As of today, gmail is blocked at school. My running joke is that they’ll someday block every website, even Google. This day, it seems, is nearer than many of us would like to believe

I’m perfectly fine with the school blocking offensive content, but what on earth could they have against gmail? If a student isn’t going to do his work, he might as well waste time sending emails, right? And what about those of us who email documents to ourselves? Oh well, I’m sure they’re not smart enough to block SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: port 25) and POP3 (post office protocol: port 110) (actually, they probably need those. [Sorry, I’m too lazy for acronym tags.]), so I can just install thunderbird in my student folder, right? (they’ll never figure that the students are that smart…) It turns out that there’s an even easier way [for the time being]. The filter blacklists domain names, ip addresses or keywords that may appear in domain names. Google has servers all over the world, and they don’t share domain names, or IP addresses. google.co.uk, for instance, is a server that is local to the UK. The Google personal homepage can be configured to show a preview of one’s Gmail inbox. Accessing one’s gmail account is as easy as displaying this preview and, accessing the Google personal homepage by going to: google.co.uk/ig, and clicking on ‘Inbox’. For now, we bask in the glory of simplicity; later on, perhaps, more complicated exploits shall be sought.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 1739:33 and is filed under dev/tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.