I couldn't find a topic that was really focusing on this subject, so I decided to create one.

To most users of the internet, information is free to access (mostly) around the globe. We use it to communicate, do business, play games, or even just hang out. When it comes to public school internet (especially mine), this isn't the case. I like to call it the selective internet or The Great Filter as some of my friends call it. I have to deal with it 5 days a week for months on end. To give you a clue of what I mean, here are some screenshots I took today:

Ticalc.org


Hulu


Netflix.... Hm...


Pandora


Itunes.... Again...


Those were just a few examples of my school's weird and inconsistent filter. Most websites from Germany, Russia, China, Korea, and New Zealand are all blocked due to them being a "security threat". Although blocking games may be a good idea, it's also a curse. I can't research anything to do with video games, which is an assignment I had to do in my engineering class. I had no choice but to do it at home. The main thing i'm mad about here is that Ticalc.org is blocked. Last week it wasn't.

The thing I want to get at here is that I believe that schools censor our internet a bit too much. I'm not saying that they shouldn't block inappropriate websites, but that they should re-examine they way we filter sites. This not only interferes with school research, it also limits teacher instruction.

Feel free to post your opinions and experiences here!

I agree, I use a VPN if I need to visit ticalc.org or do research projects.

I agree! My school blocks EVERYTHING. Once, it even blocked its own website (slow clapping). What's even worse is that Cemetech was blocked today! I can't access it at school now.

That happened to my school too. It took almost 3 years for www.NASA.gov to get unblocked. However some really bad sites still haven't been blocked. Wow these censoring techniques are real smart aren't they?
My school as also decided to block Wikipedia and any sites and videos with violence in them, which makes it impossible to do any research project on the World Wars, Civil war, etc.

I've pretty much given up hope on my school WiFi and resorted to using a VPN or tethering to my phone to my laptop.

I just skip everything and use tethering. Word is that my school WiFi blocks Gmail. I don't think Cemetech is blocked, because it showed up on my math teacher's computer once I told her that I'd been publishing my programs

I go to college and I think the assumption is that we are reasonable enough to not be visiting inappropriate websites...
That or they really don't care, which sounds equally plausible.

The filters at my school were not very effective. But teachers were always keeping an eye on everyone's screens, so you could really not do much with it.
When they blocked the internet, they just blocked traffic to the DNS server. One could use another DNS to get around this. They were also using a proxy to restrict the websites one could use, but there were also ways to get around this by using a home computer as a proxy (IPs are changing all the time anyways, which is why I am not a fan of IP blocking, which is extremely ineffective) which they could never blacklist.
We did not spend much time at their PCs, so we only wrote very few tests on them, but even though there was some kind of exam mode, every student PC in the entire building had a public network folder that could be accessed without a password. Exchanging solutions would have been totally possible.