[plug] filter-bypass

[Gavin Tweedie]

Alternative solution.

Our school was featured on a current affair aust wide because of our great
anit porn and anti anything illegal software which was funning on our NT
proxy server.

To prove to our head of department that its braindead, I wrote some small
scripts which I then stuck on my linux box in the office. These scripts
translated pages and urls and images names to different stuff which would
not be picked up by the program.

Example

www.playboy.com is on the "bad" list

you go to the page on my machine, type in the box www.playboy.com, hit
enter, my machine then downloads the page and all images and junk on it,
and RENAMES all files to things like a001.gif a002.jpg etc... it then
searched thru the html file and replaced instances of say "sex.gif" with
"a001.gif" or whatever was the approptiate translated name. In this way,
the server did not pick it up, I demonstrated it to the head of dept and
sure enuff not one "naughty" site that he could think of would show up on
his proxy.
(Im not sure where the scripts are now, their backed up on a cd somewhere
seeing as i had no real use for them, other than to prove the computing
staff were stupid, the proxy is also a linux machine now, not NT so their
special filter they had no longer works or is turned on)

It would be very easy to make this into a "real" program and put it on an
external site or shell in the USA for example, and make all your web
requests go thru it, then they are translated before getting to australian
shores and wouldnt/shouldnt show up.

The other alternative would be to simply setup a tunnel from your machine
to a remote machine, and encrypt it on the fly with pgp, des, blowfish or
even simply uuencode it. ANY of these would stop it showing up on the
filters, but the pgp would also prevent prying eyes of officials seeing
what the tunnel contained...


Comments?


Gavin


On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, David Bastow wrote:

> If the only kind of censorship the MP's are expecting to be provided is
> one which searches for `Beavis and Buthead Chuckle Words', how hard will
> such a system be to `get around' anyway...
> 
> Server-Side: Replace necessary words with a numeric code (presumably the
> number 69 is banned though?) - perhaps even the hexadecimal character
> equivalent of you origional.
> 
> Client-Side: Small Java app, converts the text page back into its
> origional form, the filter is blind to what is actually being transmitted.
> 
> 
> Any webmaster worth their weight in scripting tools could whip up one of
> those faster than altavista can find porn!  
> 
> Have they really thought this through?
>   David B
> 
>