Avoiding School Firewall

[World Leader Pretend]

Hey, I would like to generate some content on my website to get more traffic, and I realized that it would be sweet to have a web-page where I would list "alternative" links to popular websites that are blocked by our school's crappy filter. People could just visit my site and either search from there or click links to direct them to non-blocked versions of the sites. Some of the sites I can think of off my head:

Facebook
MySpace
Gmail
Xanga
Hotmail
etc....

From the message you receive when it denies access it lists the "http://myspace" as the culprit. It won't block sites that have a different initial url, like "http://example123/www.myspace.com" How can I make my site display the desired website inside my own site? My website is iWeb based right now, but I know some basic HTML. How hard is it to edit iWeb HTML externally?

[rollercoaster375]

<?php

$url = urldecode ( $_GET['url'] );
echo file_get_contents ( $url );

?>

Probably some bug in that, but the basic concept should work. Access it like: http://server.tld/script.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmyspace.com
It then gets the source of that page and displays it. *shrug*

[World Leader Pretend]

Is it that easy?

Also, how do you display iWeb's HTML in an external program? I have Nvu and I'm not sure how to edit or even display iWeb's generated content.

[Windowsrookie]

You need to set up a proxy. I think abb made a tutorial somewhere around here. Although, if you do this. Your site will be blocked within a month.

[Majost]

<?php

$url = urldecode ( $_GET['url'] );
echo file_get_contents ( $url );

?>

Probably some bug in that, but the basic concept should work. Access it like: http://server.tld/script.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmyspace.com
It then gets the source of that page and displays it. *shrug*
Yeah, that doesn't work... at least not in PHP4.

[World Leader Pretend]

You need to set up a proxy. I think abb made a tutorial somewhere around here. Although, if you do this. Your site will be blocked within a month.

Why will it be blocked?

[Majost]

Okay, so I got curious. Here's the thread about doing this exact same thing, with the solution and all, complete with warnings and cease and desist phone calls. (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=13111&highlight=proxy+php) :lol:

Why will it be blocked?

If the school's IT director is worth his salt, he'll see the relatively large amount of requests going to www.yourserver.com, and add it to the list of domains to block. It's a one line change, and isn't hard to make.

Or, if you're running it off of your personal internet connection, depending upon the amount of traffic you generate, you may get a letter from your provider (not so) kindly asking you to stop.

In case you're curious:
Thanks Wickers... actually I figured out how to view the access log, which provides a nice account of pages visited (over 7500 pages served today!). Most of it was Myspace, CNN, games, etc.

Unfortunately, however, my parents got a nasty phone call from the school a few minutes ago. :( My mom and dad made me shut down the proxy server, threatening to discontinue internet service should I keep it online. It really sucks because my mom is a district employee, so she could lose her job if I kept the proxy server running (damn public school politics).

The good news is some friends set up a couple mirrors (one of which is on a super-fast fiber connection), so Echo Base's legacy shall live on to combat internet censorship. :D

[Banana]

This is toally hilarious, considering that my university's physical plant employees would visit porn sites on library computers during their break/lunch time in open space without any consequences.

USA is very oxymoronic place to live; oppress and censor your kids until they're 18 then let them run wild and go to hell and back. No wonder it's such fucked up place.

[World Leader Pretend]

Our IT department is still living in the 80s. Our server is over 15 years old. Does that make any difference?

Oooh! Does this work?

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www."forbiddensite".com ?

I could just list a bunch of links from my site couldn't I?

[Jerman]

Hehe, all this reminds me of what I set up in high school. I set up a webserver on our home connection that also had vnc. Found a java VNC viewer, so I pulled that up from the webserver and could use my Mac machine from the Windows computers there. Was pretty slow due to our 128k uplink, but did the trick.

And then what I did on the Windows computers running Novell... The screen resolution was hard coded on our 19" to 1024x768, which killed me. I saved command.com to my web server, and just called that up each class (For my Java class). Loading that gave me a command line, and I just loaded explorer.exe and other things I wanted, and ran in glorious 1280x1024.

[rollercoaster375]

Yeah, that doesn't work... at least not in PHP4.
Just tested, works fine in PHP5.

Tested again, and works fine, albeit slower, in PHP4.

I'm working on a link-modifying proxy script at the moment, mainly for the fun of it. I'll post it if I can get it to work fully.

[Ryan]

Hehe, all this reminds me of what I set up in high school. I set up a webserver on our home connection that also had vnc. Found a java VNC viewer, so I pulled that up from the webserver and could use my Mac machine from the Windows computers there. Was pretty slow due to our 128k uplink, but did the trick.

And then what I did on the Windows computers running Novell... The screen resolution was hard coded on our 19" to 1024x768, which killed me. I saved command.com to my web server, and just called that up each class (For my Java class). Loading that gave me a command line, and I just loaded explorer.exe and other things I wanted, and ran in glorious 1280x1024.I did the same thing at my old high school. I'm going to set something else up over winter break to get around the Websense filters my new school uses, which blocks Wikipedia. I plan on using DynDNS to give myself a URL, so if/when it gets blocked, I can just switch URLs. I don't plan on giving out the address though, so they probably won't even notice.

[World Leader Pretend]

Alright, I tried to put up a bunch of links on my site using the Google translator trick and it worked for a few sites, but not Facebook style sites when another clause was entered (for example, it said it was blocked due to "social and romantic networking" or something dumb like that)

I want to try that code that rollercoster375 wrote. How would you implement that into an iWeb site? Remember, this isn't for me, but for others who want to use it.

[rollercoaster375]

You can't. Your host has to support PHP to do that.