Since the beginning of me being in my school district, there has always been some stupid restrictions on what we can do on our computers. So just this year, 10th grade, I decided to piss off the school district administrator for his dumb incorporation of Websense. And if anyone knows Websense from school or work, it is arguably the most annoying and retarded website block that ever existed. Unless you can name another.

So it began with Websense blocking game sites as usual. When our business scripting teacher says we can play games, I knew it was ok to play stuff after I've finished my work, which consists of using HTML and Javascript. Easy. They started blocking the flash games. Ok, no big deal, just a n00b Websense. At this point in time I didn't have a USB drive to bring any games in yet. So I proceeded to use command prompt to ping the websites. Slightly less easy, as some IP addresses change frequently. Websense at the time didn't block IP addresses, and voila. Then IP was blocked. Then proxy servers blocked. URL language Translation blocked.

So I was like, ok, this is sorta fun finding ways around stuff. I converted all my urls to hex and it worked yet again. A few weeks later, blocked. Yeah, Websense is gay. Another month later it got so stupid that it freaking blocked the school district's own site. Our teachers were totally dumbfounded.

I got my USB drive a bit after that incident. I brought in some of my own games, and someone had also brought Counter Strike and put it in the school's global drive. Luckily I had copied it, since the administrators started noticing and started deleting games off the drive. We always put then in inconspicuous places though. So after I copied it I simply put CS onto my very own virtual drive issued to all district students, our very own virtual terrabyte drive. Spiffy, that's a HUGE amount of space. We played CS and Starcraft in school for about 2 months, and it was pretty fun when we all finished out assignments early. Then the administrators got smart and blocked all games ever played on the computer. Except Age of Empires 2. And we're like wtf - is this supposed to be some sort of joke? I didn't like AoE personally, Starcraft > it. Maybe the admins thought it was "educational". Nice.

Since this was a group policy restriction I simply unplugged the Ethernet cable when I logged in, so it didn't apply the settings. It worked again. For about a week. After that they set restrictions on all computers, teacher or student. Ouch, that stopped me for now. Can't find a way around it… yet. It might sound stupid, but I found this a challenge, and yet they can't trace me because I'm using the library log-in in the library, along with the 20 other people there using it.

So now I'm bored when I go to school, trying to figure out how to bypass Websense again. I figure using Firefox on my USB (we obviously aren't allowed to download anything) along with a plugin that deletes headers would prolly work, as I think Websense blocks depending on site headers. Who knows, all I know is that this district is GAY.

I hope the college I'll be going to doesn't do stupid things like this at their dorm :(