I did IT for a school district and staying on top of proxies was a game of whack a mole. I’d do it because I was asked too, but kids will find a new proxy that works. And the little bastards are more clever than we give them credit for.
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Survey data show how these inequities play out. The Center for Democracy and Technology asked teachers last year whether internet filtering and blocking can make it harder for students to complete assignments. Among teachers in schools with high rates of poverty, 62 percent said yes; among teachers in schools with lower rates, 50 percent said the same.
So neither students nor teachesr like it?
In my school in Germany, all computers were always set up in a way such that the teacher could look at any screen immediately. If a minor accesses a porn site, they’ll tell you by giggling, so what’s the need for filtering, anyway?
The US education system is a complete trainwreck. The teachers are underpaid to the point it should be criminal, and as a consequence many of the teachers are also poorly educated themselves and a lot of them are also technically illiterate as a consequence. IT departments are also underfunded, and what technical training and support they should be providing to teachers often doesn't happen. This isn't universal of course, there are highly educated and technically literature teachers, but they're few and far between.
Even worse the invasion of school boards by both the MAGA cult and Karens has turned schools into political battlegrounds where oftentimes the most successful teachers aren't the ones who are skilled at teaching, but the ones who are best at politicking and sucking up to administration.
They're actually doing more than that in U.S. schools. My daughter typed something on her school notebook in elementary school and it alerted the administration due to a keyword. I'm actually glad it did in that case because it led to some necessary follow-ups by us (no, she was not going to shoot up the school), but it still disturbed me that they were able to do that at all.
My school in the US had that too, but I don't think any of the teachers even knew about it because they never used it.
The thing with filtering porn is that it does not work. Full stop. DuckDuckGo proxies images served in the image results, and startpage has a literal webpage proxy. Not to mention the Internet Archive.
They've been doing this since the 2000s. I remember having to set up a proxy server at home just so I could connect to it and actually browse the Internet at school without every third site being blocked for no reason.
I just used sketchy Chinese websites designed for bypassing the Chinese firewall
This is what happens when the schools are so broke that instead of getting proper IT they have to get the cheapest blocker possible and then just dial up the blocking to 11.
Same old same old. I remember back when some schools blocked Wikipedia article on Dick Chaney. Why the porn blocker would block any url with dick in it.
Missouri wanted those sites blocked, and the kids who are now vulnerable to suicide are the kind those people don’t want living anyway.
Fuck MISERY!
They also block adblockers (at least in my area). So I'm trying to find a good laptop for my sister to use next year.
In case it helps you, I've found that the uMatrix extension has been a great way to auto-block all Javascripts while still being able to permit just the ones needed to work past a site or network's limitations.
There's a little bit of a learning curve at first, but nothing too bad. Using the extension also feels empowering, because it gives you much more control than just a flat 'block everything' anti-ad approach.
Not diminishing how shitty this is
But where does it say NASA is blocked?
...why is "education" a category for blocks? We were afraid you might use the computers at school to learn something?
You're not supposed to be educating yourself, you're supposed to stick to the curriculum. You might learn the wrong things!
We had to take my daughter out of public school and put her in online school due to severe bullying and now I act as a "learning coach," which means I basically sit with her and make sure she stays on track. But it also gives me examples to do things to tell her when the school is lying to her. Overall it's pretty decent (social studies is remarkably even-handed for an American social studies class), but her health class is abysmal. Yesterday, they were talking about the benefits of AA and I had to explain to her that, while AA helps some people, it is not backed by science, was founded from a prayer group, and the founder thought that the actual way to stop drinking was to do AA and take LSD, so it's not even doing what "Bill W." wanted.
It also said nothing about courts mandating AA, which is interesting, since it made it very clear that you can only quit an addiction if you want to.
That's far from the only time I've had to tell her that what her health class is telling her is bullshit. Even the quitting smoking section had some nonsense and didn't even mention smoking cessation medication (I have no idea why).
Somebody mixed up the whitelist and blacklist.
Other notorious sites blocked under Education:
- merriam-webster.com
- loc.gov (Library of Congress)
- unf.edu (University of Florida)
- oceanservice.noaa.gov
- duckduckgo.com
New question, why is duckduckgo in the education category? Are all search engines?
I suppose it's most likely some parents heard a kid was "slacking off looking at pretty pictures" and complained...
"The moon landing was a hoax" , "we shouldn't be funding people to stare out into space", "What has NASA ever done for us", and other favorite GOP tunes.
Aside from the "moon landing was a hoax", I've seen democrats express similar sentiments about NASA. At least until I point out that a lot of our modern technology is based on stuff either developed directly by NASA or for NASA by a government contractor. That and the fact that NASA is one of the most, if not the most, profitable US agencies. Like, iirc NASA provides a 6x return for every dollar spent on them. As such, I find it really strange that the US is determined to keep NASA's funding at a minimum when we could be using them to generate a lot of money for the economy.
I work in K12 IT, and the reason is that all manner of categories are defined for both blacklisting and whitelisting when creating content filter rules. So while “education” would not be used for blocking, it would be useful for rules to apply to specific defined groups or devices which can only access specific categories (such as education). Just FYI.
All sites are categorized. Which categories are blocked is up to the administrator.
Sure. The question was more "why would education be a category chosen for blocking by a school administrator?"
Categories such as “education” are useful for limiting access for specific groups of devices. For example, if one class has a particularly mischievous group who keep going off task from their devices, rules can be created to whitelist certain categories, and only pass traffic that are in these more straightforward categories. Just FYI.
I didn't think I needed "protection" from anything on the Internet at all when I was a minor.
My stance has not changed merely because I am no longer personally affected. I still think that it is completely stupid to want to keep any information at all from young people in the first place.

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