They've locked on to my tricorder!

[Avatar]

 

Well I must've really pissed off the IT gods at work.  I mean, in our whole network who but I would be surfing a tiny little site dedicated to a ten year old dead game?

Bastards blocked BZUNIVERSE. 

"No business value" is what comes up when I try it.  It's not like I spent more than my break time surfing, but still...   to me it means some poor flunky in India probably had to actually surf here and see what it was about, then mark it as dead.

Bah...  back to Solitaire on breaks.  Idiots...   

Makes me feel a LOT less guilty about all the stuff I do behind IT's back... 

-Av-

[Zero Angel]

Theres a technique I use to get around that, its called tunneling via SSH.

Requires 1 linux machine with SSH server installed
A dynamic DNS to your home machine (ie: zeroangelmk1.no-ip.com)
Putty and a simple .bat file
Firefox with FoxyProxy extension

Takes a couple of hours to set up if you're starting from scratch with no SSH tunneling experience, but at the end, you got a totally encrypted internet connection that nobody can snoop in on or block (assuming of course they don't block your connection to your house). In addition, you can SFTP (transfer files) to and from your linux server, as well as have the ability to run commands on your linux server.

And I suppose if you have the dynamic DNS thing set up, you could also establish a VNC (remote desktop) connection to your home computer.

I've got a portable 2"5 hard drive that has portable Firefox as well as portable putty installed on it. I click on a .bat file and it connects me to my home machine, and I turn on foxyproxy to access the internet through the SSH tunnel -- and i'm set!

Theres very likely an easier way to do this. Mine is just ultra-geeky!

[OvermindDL1]

I just have a little proxy script (that works in IE, Firefox, Opera, Windows in general, just about anything in existence) that redirects non-local addresses to my own server to redirect elsewhere, I get past everything then while still having the inner address work.  Sad thing is, I originally set that up because I needed to get a site that was required to do work, but was blocked for some forsaken reason...

If anyone wants to know how to make that little script, just ask, it is really simple, and even if the work blocks setting proxy settings in windows, for some reason the proxy script field never seems to be blocked anywhere I have been.
Generated by OvermindDL1's Signature Auto-Add Script that OvermindDL1 did manually since Greasemonkey does not work in Firefox 3.1 yet...

[Sonic]

If you don't mind the not so pretty version of BZU, you could just use SSH to a linux box and use the text browser elinks to check on BZU.

[Zero Angel]

Creating a firefox proxy via SSH isnt that difficult, it can be done with putty and a .bat script.
This is the bat script I use to establish an SSH tunnel

Code Select Expand

@ECHO OFF
ECHO. Establishing SSH Connection on Ubuntu (Dave)
start putty -D 80 -P 443 -ssh Guest@zeroangelmk1.no-ip.com
What this does basically is tells putty to connect to zeroangelmk1.no-ip.com (my linux box) as username Guest (which is a user account I set up on that machine -- you can use your main user account if you want). The port that it is connecting to is 443 (I've set my SSH server to use port 443, which is the HTTPS port -- IOW: It will look like normal encrypted web traffic to the untrained eye) and to tunnel it through port 80, which is the normal HTTP/Web Browsing port.

I used to have a really good script which automatically entered the password in and handled various other contingencies, but I lost it. This one is simple and does the trick though.

[OvermindDL1]

Problem is, most of those configurations listed do not work without admin privies and with things locked down (like at my job), hence why my method still works.  Just make yourself a proxy script, kind of looks like C, but it is interpreted and has proxy specific commands, works everywhere from what I have seen.
Generated by OvermindDL1's Signature Auto-Add Script that OvermindDL1 did manually since Greasemonkey does not work in Firefox 3.1 yet...

[Zero Angel]

Providing you have portable putty and portable firefox on your thumbdrive, these shouldnt need admin priviliges. These dont touch the underlying configuration of your computer or use any of the system tools (except for maybe cmd).

I'm interested to learn your method OM.

[CmptrWz]

What is with companies blocking things? Where I work we don't block anything, and we provide Internet for libraries that have obligations to block things that could be objectionable when kids are using the computers and such.

I could probably browse porn at work and nobody would NOTICE unless they looked at my screen.

In fact, the only time I worked on computers at a location that was blocking sites the block list consisted of "sites that are obviously trying to do drive-by installs of crapware, phishing sites, and sites that are obviously trying to get you to install stuff to take control of your machine without your knowledge or consent" and nothing more. They had issues keeping that list up to date, and they had one group dedicated to doing it for all 19 physical locations. Hell, they had someone who's ASSIGNED job was to look for porn sites that had fake codecs.

All that said, if there is anything I might need to do such that a given proxy or proxy service works, let me know.

[AHadley]

You'd be surprised at the amount of stuff we get blocked at my school. They blocked Google once. Big mistake. The IT guys got complaints left, right and centre. Anything they deem to have 'no educational value' has been utterly blocked. Though I never use the net at school for anything other than research and checking on my emails. I've never tried to get on to BZ2MD or BZU.

[Red Devil]

Use a wireless laptop/iPhone/Blackberry maybe?

[TheJamsh]

i know a solution that involves the queen or the president 'owing you one'

[Raven]

I laugh at my school's proxy with Tor. No I don't sign into anything I just look around.

[Avatar]

Interesting, and I'd love to learn those techniques myself...  but there are no direct connections to anything at work from the outside.  We have 15 proxy servers across the country that everything not internal route through.  While I can reach my home box IF I VPN into our network from home I'm then limited to browsing through our proxy servers.

IOW if I can reach my home box at all then I'm then as limited as I am at work.

If there's some way around this I'd love to know, but it's easier for me to just drag a laptop to work with me and hook into some stray wi-fi in the area.  Slow but unrestricted...   

-Av-

[CmptrWz]

See, open source VPN software tends to be able to talk to commercial VPN systems with a bypass on the "you have to route everything through them" rule. I believe Sonic has done this recently with his school, so he has more recent experience than I do.

[Sonic]

Oh, you mean how I told my linux box here screw with the non-split-tunneling rule, just let me go where I want? Heh, I have it so my entire network is capable of routing into my school's lab one I establish the link.