School Proxy Sites To Unblock Myspace, Youtube, Facebook
December 22, 2008
If you are currently a student, it is really difficult to find good proxy sites for school to unblock myspace, facebook, youtube, bebo etc. There are so much things to be done online, yet there are only do few resources that are not blocked by websense and other internet content filtering software. These high school students need a new school proxy bypass all the internet filtering software such as lightspeed etc that have been installed on their school network firewall. When you are building free school proxy sites for these students, you need to take special care to enhance the cloakability and stealthiness of your proxies. Internet anonymity is not very important for these school bypassers, in fact those enhanced anonymous proxy servers that hide every internet information such as Referer header, X-Forwarded-For headers etc may not work correctly with some websites that refuse to allow users trying to hide their identities.
Students trying to unblock myspace only want your school proxy sites to stay unblocked as long as possible such that they do not need to keep on looking for new proxies every other day, therefore do not use a domain name such as www.proxy.com. If you can afford it, try to install some cloaking plugins on your servers to unblock anti proxy mechanisms like bluecoat, websense etc. These plugins try to identify the automated bots that are coming in to crawl and check your school proxey content for questionable stuff. When a filter bot is identified, the stealth proxy plugin will load some innocent academic content for the bots to crawl. This allows your site to be labeled under approved, safe for school categories until it is discovered by a human operator, which can be several months later as long as you remain low profile and under their radar. If your website end up being labeled as proxy avoidance, that is the end of the road as far as schools using that web filter is concerned. If you like to know how your school proxy engines are performing, try to get in touch with actual school users. If they keep sending email asking “can you find some school proxies for us”, at least you know that what you have being doing may not be the best for long term results and you need to innovate and find new cloaking methods to keep your websites unblocked for as long as possible. You can also go the other direction and use brute force to fight firewall filters and bypass websites for schools. This is the so-called daily school proxies method where you create one or a few new webproxy bypass servers that have not being checked by filtering bots before. You may need to register new domain names very very frequently for this to work, so make sure you are able to sustain a profit and have your monetizing strategies fully fine tuned before taking this route. You should also periodically check traffic levels because the filtering blocks can work on your IP address as well as the domain name. When it is discovered that a lot of students are using a lot of webproxies that are hosted on the same IP, it does not take much to assume that the identified IP is jam packed with school proxies, web anonymizers etc and can be safely blocked and blacklisted without worrying that some other legitimate websites are accidentally filtered as well. When your IP address is blocked, all proxies, actually all websites hosted on that IP will not be reached from behind the school networks. If you are on a dedicated server, ask your hosting company to change another IP for you. Check that this IP is fresh and never been blocked previously as well – immediately setup a new site on the new unblocked IP and ask your student users to check if it can really bypass school filters, otherwise ask for another IP address. If you are on a shared proxy hosting plan, then maybe someone else is the cause for blacklisting this particular IP address. This is the reason why some proxy hosting providers recommend clients to sign up for a dedicated IP for around $2 per month. It is quite a cheap measure if you do not want to worry about other proxy owners causing unnecessary problems for you, but it cannot protect you from your own activities.
Some people suggest using school bypass proxy that end in .org, since such domain tlds are frequently used by non profit and voluntary organizations. Actually I do not think this is going to work, the lightspeed and bluecoat content filtering bots are not very intelligent, but they can easily tell proxies ending with .org apart from mylocalchurch orgs.
Besides creating proxies not blocked by websense easily, students also want compatibility with video sites. They often search for free proxy websites with flash player in order to view youtube videos in school. Many PHProxy scripts are misconfigured to load adobe flash videos directly without proxifying. This means the flash videos cannot be viewed even though youtube can be reached. There are more glype proxies that are configured to correctly proxify youtube adobe videos so when these are eventually blocked by lightspeed filters as well, the students may actually try to find other daily school proxies in order to unblock proxy websites running the glype youtube functions.
Many students have learnt to visit school proxy listing sites in order to get new daily proxies to bypass websites at school. Choose a well managed listing that are not spammed like mad by profiteers that run fake proxies and already blocked ones. Even though these are free and easily found, you will still want to make sure they are safe unblocked proxy lists that will not cause a lot of viruses and spyware problems to the school computers. This causes a really big headache for network administrators in schools and is actually a big reason why they fight back and stop students from using proxies for unauthorized web surfing. Be responsible and do not place malware on your sites and trick students to using them. By the way, when the student say goodbye to their classmates when the yearly school holidays begin, you can also say goodbye to your earnings for school proxies. Nobody is going to need your help to view videos and websites around school blocks.
