I USED to be able to read the message board at night when I was doing supervision of students. After the first 1 1/2 hours of direct instruction they have a 2 hours of independent work each night and I just have to answer the occasional question. Now Vendetta is BLOCKED by our school's filtering software, and most proxies are also blocked. No more following the Vendetta saga until I get home :( I'm going to be sooo bored. I am actualy making up work to do becuase I'm too efficent (like writing alternate test versions for tests we already have) It takes some of the other teachers all 2 hours to do the attendence, grade papers and update the phonelogs.

Unlucky! I'm waiting for my employer to block this site, but so far so good ;-) It's not my fault I can code double speed and get stuff done in half the time... hehe... You can try using translation sites, ie. babelfish to get through the filters... Converting to and from chinese always seemed to be the closest, but obviously sometimes the original meaning is lost...

As I said... Proxies, proxies, proxies! ^_^

bablefish is great as icarus said

It's good to be the entire IT department. Well, I'm really the entire web department but there is no IT department so the firewall is minez. Besides I can see how many off-topic (pr0n) sites the boss surfs (it's his bandwidth I guess), I wonder if I should ever mention about log files to him? Nah...

The faster you work the less money you make Icarus ... well, not if your goofing off I suppose. The last place I worked would just pile it on if you were too efficent. If you were slow and stupid and made your project look hard you'd get kudos for trudging through a tough one.

Babel Fish is also pretty safe, there are a lot of dubious proxie servers out there, be careful with random ones. All sorts of spyware and what nots. Jeez it's getting hard to get rid of 'cool web search' anymore isn't it? I'm so glad I don't use Windose at home.

Hoax, it works out fine for me cos I do the work in the latter half of the projected timeline, and I always make out its been major hassle ;-) The rest of the time I spend reading news sites, watching share prices, and coding my own stuff .. lol..

Or you can use one of the many available tools that ask you for the URL of the site, and it will fetch the content and print it to your browser, so it looks like the content is coming from their site, not actually where it's originating from. It's fairly simple to do, and in fact I've even made a quick Perl CGI script that does the same thing. Some are even sophisticated enough to fetch images, etc, and change all the links to refetch the code through their script again when you click on them.

In short, filters aren't hard to get around. :P. I can look and see what I can find as far as this type of script goes that's free and easy to use, if there's interest.

Cant someones husband set up an errrm, something for you? sure he can, if i can get round the old software filters, im sure errrm, somebodys husband can....lol

I have to decide how sneaky i want to be. There is still a question of why Vendetta was blocked. Did the IT look at the usage logs and discover my visits? If I use a proxy I don't want to be disciplined for using it. I feel the IT is on a power trip and is still punishing me for showing them up/ filing a complaint becuase he erased all my desktop files (gradebook, etc)when he came in to reinstall IE and couldn't get them back and wouldn't use the approach I suggested. I had to bring in an "outside consultant" to verify I was thinking of the the proper recovery proceedure. BTW we were able to recover the gradebook whew!
My computer upgrade from 95 to 2000 is still in progress. I've basically lost internet connection in my classroom and I have to use a library or lab computer (I had turned the proxy off on my personal computer). I've been promised a new computer, or at least an updated computer for over 18 months... but I digress...

Your IT have either decided to change the filter rules as part of an overhaul or perhaps routine maintenance, OR they have noticed your access to the Vendetta site (by looking into logs) and decided to block it. No way of knowing unless you approach them. As you mention, they could be on your back... These people tend to be annoying little power-hungry dweebs that like to make life miserable for others.

>he erased all my desktop files (gradebook, etc)when he came
>in to reinstall IE

LOL, how is that even possible. That sounds like the school district IT my wife has to deal with. They would ghost her drive if her e-mail glitched. I'm so sorry...

The thing about using babelfish is that it's not a proxy per say, plus there are a thousand legitimate things you could be using it for in a school setting so it shouldn't be blocked or look suspicious in a log file.

Agh, I'm all to familiar with sysadmins who try to hide their lack of well.. basics, by blocking and disabling everything in sight. Our school's admins blocked Google and Hotmail once because it was accessed too much... very cunning that their own mail system didn't worked at all during that time. (altough the Hotmail users deserver it) It's impossible to use 'ctrl-n' in Internet Explorer because 'the security level does not permit it' (uhh.. yeah.) And what's the answer to the system locking up at startup because some kind of crappy home-made anti-virus script freezes? Reboot, doesn't work? Reboot again! Well then, I guess that concluded computer-science lessons for that day. Of course, you can still quite easily fiddle around in the command prompt, edit the registry, modify c:\winnt\ (which is only reset, like.. once a month) or simply use bootable floppies, but hey, those aren't really a security threat, right? Right?

So maybe, you have just been accessing it 'too often' and it has been blocked simply because of that, could also be possible that the filter panicked after seeing all those words in the question thread...

I'd bet you are correct that IT noted your access to Vendetta and denied you manually. I had a similar issue when using Shoutcast mp3 radio awhile back, though I can't blame them for that because of the bandwidth usage if more people were doing it. I work behind a pretty hefty set of security measures, and I can still access the website ju

[CLIENT TERMINATED]

LOL, I just found out that my school has just blocked this site!

So, I went to ask the techs. why...
They gave a simple answer... "Because you can chat on it."

WHAT!?!?!?! no other forum is blocked, and i've been "chatting" on this message board from school for months!! I hate them now! If they look on the logs, they'll know that i'm basically the only person who goes on it at school...
They won't even let one person off!

I'm my school's IT department.. And i'm in 11th grade. How's that for sad?

Full control over everything, the server, the grades, the blocked sites list....

Basically he came in and reset some function that as a feature it rebuilds the desktop, When i asked him about this he said he knew this "the erasing of files" would happen beucase several other peoplw experienced the same thing. And he did go on to say it was my fault the files got erased because I should know better than to save "any" files to the desktop.

And the worst thing was that after he left I turned off my comupter and the next day it was broken again..

God that would be awesome.

Yeah, that's why everything I need goes on my pen drive or my website (in a folder below my web-facing stuff), or both. :P

Any of you guys know of a proxy, through which you can access sites written in PHP?

We have websense at work and bablefish does not seem to work :(

http://www.publicproxyservers.com/

Enjoy!