• Michael (unregistered)

    This reminds me when the e-commerce IT Dev boss at my former job (banking) said:"uh! we should block Google cache, because everyone can see the blocked sites through there."

  • AndrewB (unregistered)

    I guess the moral of the story is that Bessy isn't good the sensibilities.

  • Adam (unregistered)

    Why is this a daily wtf...

    Captcha: luptatum.... damn near killed um.

  • godfrey (unregistered)

    Alright!! Now you're posting TheDailyWTF fan fiction. Super.

  • Kainsin (unregistered)

    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

  • Someone too lazy to login and at work (unregistered)

    Keyword filtering is always utterly flawed. Witness the number of filters that block Scunthorpe. I know of at least one IRC channel that kicked you for saying it.

  • (cs) in reply to godfrey
    godfrey:
    Alright!! Now you're posting TheDailyWTF fan fiction. Super.
    Even resorted to baiting us with
    For some reason, Violet K. couldn't show her sex video to the class.
    when 'sex ed video' would have been the appropriate term. Must have been this effort that exhausted him and led him to type 'isn't good the sensibilities.'
  • V (unregistered)

    Reminds me of this.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHb5QVD7fo

  • 50% Opacity (unregistered)

    Imagining Juliette Burber in the role of Violet made the whole story actually rather entertaining.

    (The frist one to get this reference receives two (2) internets in his or her mailbox.)

  • Richy C. (unregistered)

    Dick Smith lived in Scunthorpe and supported the Arsenal football club. He had sextuplates at home with his girlfriend Dorothy Titt - they were conceived after they had been to Condom-en-Armagnac in France.

    Ah - keyword filtering.... :)

  • Joseph M. (unregistered)

    This WTF is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and living persons is purely coincidental.

  • Keyword Filter Bot (unregistered) in reply to Richy C.
    Richy C.:
    Dick Smith lived in Svaginahorpe and supported the Buttnal football club. He had intercourcetuplates at home with his girlfriend Dorothy breastt - they were conceived after they had been to prophylactic-en-Armagnac in France.

    Ah - keyword filtering.... :)

    Keyword Filter Bot has FTFY!

  • Leo (unregistered) in reply to Kainsin
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

  • noone (unregistered)

    Oh, c'mon! It's a heart-warming story of students defeating Big Brother. How can you not love this, people?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Leo
    Leo:
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!

  • Ramses So let it be written so let it be done (unregistered)

    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

  • Andy (unregistered)

    Pretty sure this is one site Stephen Conroy will be adding to the Australian Internet Blacklist. Wouldn't want people to know how ineffective the filters really are..

  • 50% Opacity (unregistered) in reply to Leo
    Leo:
    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    You could spawn shells? Pah, we had to write a shell first!

    Every time.

    Both ways. In the snow.

  • WildcatMike (unregistered) in reply to Leo

    You had computers in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use a typewriter and generous amounts of white out to write any application.

  • (cs) in reply to Richy C.
    Richy C.:
    Dick Smith lived in Scunthorpe and supported the Arsenal football club. He had sextuplates at home with his girlfriend Dorothy Titt - they were conceived after they had been to Condom-en-Armagnac in France.

    Ah - keyword filtering.... :)

    Clbuttic something something, etc.

  • mc (unregistered)

    <sarcasm> You're right. How dare they attempt to utilize content filtering in a SCHOOL, of all places! Just think of how this will affect the Honors Pornography class! </sarcasm>

    Captcha: augue - In Boston, we don't augue about content filtering, we just use a proxy.

  • (cs) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    No, it's correct. I will not be Googling for corroborative evidence.

  • (cs) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    It's your immaturity. It's Latin for with and often used in sentences like that.

  • agent f (unregistered) in reply to V
    V:
    Reminds me of this.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHb5QVD7fo

    content blocked!

    category: dangerous knowledge.

    also,

    captcha: feugiat. ...... bless you!

  • Bob, from Enzote (unregistered)

    Ah kids. Running around the roadblocks that administrators put in front of them as if they weren't even there.

    It was even more comical back in the Win98 days. We'd have full access to the machine, knew about startup scripts, proxy sites, Telnet, and the lovely amount of things to find on IRC.

    The grownups never had a chance.

  • @Deprecated (unregistered) in reply to Richy C.
    Richy C.:
    He had sextuplates...
    And here I am, at home, using regular plates like a chump. Where do I find this kind?
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    Yes, it is just your immaturity showing. Cum is an English word meaning "with", descended from a Latin word with the same meaning. Using the word "come" there would have been incorrect.

    See: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cum

  • Patrick (unregistered)

    I remember when I had an annoying problem on my school computers. It had been locked up so tight the only applications that worked were MS Office and IE. IE had a problem with going to a graphics hungry home page and that took waaaay too long to respond to the STOP command, assuming you clicked it before it froze. You see, the network was connected to the internet through a dialup modem and everyone opened up three browser windows immediately at the start of the lesson to get through the delay. Basically, it was first in - first served. Whoever logged in the fastest got the internet. My first way around this was to create a web hyperlink in Word, save it as plain text called "internet.url" and click that. Of course, it had to be saved on a floppy disk as the working folder was wiped clean on logoff. The better way around it, I found, was to edit the registry and change the homepage. Of course, the registry editor from my home computer wouldn't run on there (no .exe file is accessible from a:\ or the working folder), and there was no way to even access c:\ (it wasn't on the drive listing, and there was no address bar. Even right-click was disabled). Or so the admins thought. I created a shortcut to a folder inside the working folder, then deleted the target and opened the shortcut. Windows immediately asked me where the target was. I told it "C:". I'm in c:, and can easily copy regedit.txt in there, rename it back to exe, run it, and change the homepage to about:blank. I had to do that to five other computers before I could beat the rush to the "fast ones", but never had to worry about waiting for a frozen browser to finish loading before I could get anything done.

  • Gaius Julius Caesar (unregistered) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    What-the-Latin-fail?

    It's Latin for "with" and, in English usage, implies "along with".

    Anyone would think you'd never read all VIII books of De Bello Gallico like most well-educated youths. Plebian.

    CAPTCHA: "erat". A good Latin word.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    It's not your maturity at fault, it's your intelligence. Othwerwise you'd be able to recognise basic Latin.

  • Patrick (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Leo:
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!
    Cardboard punch cards?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    It's not your maturity at fault, it's your intelligence. Othwerwise you'd be able to recognise basic Latin.
    I was beaten to it, by pretty much everyone in the thread. So clearly it is just you who can't recognise Latin!

  • //Rumen (unregistered)

    Is it just me, or was this article somewhat hard to follow? Even though I got the point, I often found myself re-reading lines to figure out who the hell they were talking about.

    I must be more tired than usual.

    /troll

    "Fake and gay"

  • Raptor (unregistered) in reply to Kainsin

    Heh, you had Fortress too? I've never heard of anyone else using that one. I'd never seen a worse security program, nor have I seen it since. We discovered a lovely little bug in it where if you brought up the password screen enough times, eventually it'd let you in. It's the only security program I know of that gave an 'A' for effort if you were trying to brute force it. To this day I wish I knew why that worked.

    In highschool they had something marginally better. It stored its "encrypted" password in the registry, which was easy enough to get to. You could then cut the password out and log in with a blank, or if you were curious, start putting the password back one character at a time so you could figure it out.

    I always wondered how much money they blew on faux security systems.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Patrick
    Patrick:
    Anonymous:
    Leo:
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!
    Cardboard punch cards?
    God, I wish! This was before paper was invented so we had to carve our punch-cards out of coal. Took us weeks to hammer out a single command.

  • NameNotFoundException (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Leo:
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!

    Ha! You had punch cards! When we wanted to have additional apps on our high school's computer, we had to bring our own tubes!

  • Dennis (unregistered)

    It's a good thing Violet isn't an English teacher.

    "Oh-- this isn't a content block. Looks like a custom block's been put on the whole site," he said, adding quickly, "But I didn't put it there!"

"Then whom?"

    "Whom" is an object, not a subject.

    Then who [did]?

    Or:

    To whom do I direct my ire?

  • null reference (unregistered)

    Ah, I have such not so fond memories of Bess. Thankfully, I was on the student support staff at my high school, so it was trivial to disable the proxy =)

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    My high school had Bess. I didn't know about proxies at the time. It blocked a dutch genealogy website for "sexual content" and the Toyota website for "violence," presumably because of the safety features page. The entire school loathed that thing.

  • (cs)

    In my day, we had macs in the schools with "At Ease". This was back in the days when telnet was still not-quite-gone, so we had NCSA Telnet on there. Now as we all know, NCSA Telnet also works as a FTP server, and client.

    So, while that didn't give me any useful access to the computer, I was always curious about what would happen if I could just

    > cd "System Folder"
200 OK
> del important-looking-things
  • mikey c (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Ah, school security policies. I remember we could run 'blocked' programs by renaming them to "notepad.exe" in Windows Explorer. I have my suspicions that the head of IT didn't bother setting up much security for the Computing A-Level students.

  • lesle (unregistered) in reply to WildcatMike
    WildcatMike:
    You had computers in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use a typewriter and generous amounts of white out to write any application.
    Wite-out® http://www.witeout.com/history/

    When I learned to type in the '50s, all we had was a typewriter eraser: eraser on one end, a whisk on the other.

  • mikey c (unregistered) in reply to mikey c

    Ooooh another thing. We had some heavily-locked down Windows 3.0 machines. But it did come with a fully-featured BBC Basic emulator installed which would give you read/write access to the hard disk...

  • Da' Man (unregistered)

    Hm, reminds me of some conservative politician in Germany who, a couple of years ago, wanted to make a certain content blocker (distributed by his brother-in-law) compulsory for every Internet user in Germany.

    That was, until somebody found out that this software even blocked access to his own web site, because he stated in his CV that he passed the University "Summa cum laude". LOL!

    Never heard of this project again. Except that another politician (same party) proposed a "Internet block" (on DNS-level) against kiddie porn. She also never thought one might just use another DNS server... the project is on halt now.

    I just wonder when the next one comes up with this.

  • Mats (unregistered)

    Had a corporative assignment with our UK "sister" school... In Sussex. Guess which 3 letters stopped us from accessing their site when the new content filtering system came into play.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Wow, Bessy is still around? I had to deal with that when I was in high school! Proxy ftw. I remember trying to do a report on an ancient and apparently offensive technology.

    pinball

  • (cs)

    This reminds me of all the fun I had as a student, circumventing my school's draconian content filters and desktop security software.

    My favorite tale was when I got caught with "telnet.exe" in my student account. Unfortunately, the admins managed to completely overlook "telnet.bin", the Mac equivalent which I found in my account after getting my computer privileges back. The best part of the story was that evidence against me for the suspension of my computer privileges was a printed out screencap of a Windows Explorer window, showing the exe icon for telnet and the "unknown file type" icon for telnet.bin. I had actually assumed they would take the liberty of deleting both. Being the coward that I was, and not wanting to tempt the admins any further, I went ahead and finished their cleanup of my account for them.

    The shortest tale was when a classmate "liberated" an entire row of Macs in the back of one of the computer labs. His methodology? Boot the macs with an OS8 install disk in their CD drives, then click-and-drag the security software out of the Mac equivalent of the "Startup" directory.

  • threecheese (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Yes, it is just your immaturity showing. Cum is an English word meaning "with", descended from a Latin word with the same meaning. Using the word "come" there would have been incorrect.

    See: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cum

    I'll bet that site is blocked...

  • tg (unregistered)

    This reminds me that the Sony PS3 text chat obviously thinks the word 'nicht' (not in German) is evil. I cannot think of any reason that would justify this. Perhaps someone can enlighten me :)

  • (cs) in reply to Kainsin

    Oh man, Fortress was the lamest "security" ever invented. My high school was smart enough to restrict the IE open command, but the Word open command (or really anything that brought up the standard Windows open dialog) worked the same way.

    The real fun part was when I realized that Fortress wasn't really restricting us from changing the system settings, but just from executing the control panel applets at certain specific paths. Uploading the .cpl files from my home computer to a web server and then downloading them at school and running them from "My Documents" got around the entire system. Bravo, Fortress.

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