lifecoding.com Blog

So, I’m sure you’re sitting there wondering what kind of bum doesn’t update his blog with more super cool posts about higher order procedures like he said he would. Well, it’s not my fault, honest. I wanted to post cool little blurbs about how fun it can be to map array elements, but big bad Websense said no. Read a little bit more, and I’ll tell you my proposed solution.

For those of you not in the know, websense is this stuff that goes between your work computer and the internet. It prevents you from doing cool things like looking at Flickr or downloading songs on iTunes (damn billionth song). It works by maintaining a master database of domain names. You try to access a domain that’s disallowed, it says no. You try to access a domain it doesn’t know about, it sends its little bot out to catalog it. If the bot decides the site is bad, it disallows it.

Now that we know how it works lets look at ways around it. First, we could vnc to a remote computer and use that computer to browse the web. Good idea, but I think that little webcrawler is going to try to access the ip address, notice it can’t do anything with it, and block it. Second, we can try using the google and yahoo caches. These are cool options, but I can’t use them to log into this blog. Also, they’re fairly clunky as far as navigation goes. Third, we could design an open source proxy server that could be easily installed on any computer. If you just try to access the server itself, it could return the google page to psych out the Websense spider. If Websense does manage to catch on to the proxy game, you just setup the server on a different ip. Woo hoo, screw you Websense.

Needless to say, I’m a fan of option three. It sounds cool, and I like to build stuff. Of course, if anyone has a working copy of this option in existence, let me know. As much as a like to build, I’d really like to be posting from work immediately.