[Smart kid. Someone at MIT, Berkeley, or CMU should let him enroll early and offer him the chance of escaping that high school and its throughly benighted administration. --Declan] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Teacher, student suspended for building proxies around school filters Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 14:06:28 -0500 From: Burt,David <david_burt@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> [Not available without paid subscription. The kid’s blog is at http://www.blog247.blogspot.com/ ] Teen suspended for Web site 'Bad Dog' allowed students to bypass Internet filter The Spokesman Review Rob McDonald Staff writer April 3, 2005 http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news/cover.asp?pubdate=4/3/2005 A Lewis and Clark High School sophomore brought Internet freedom to his peers for two months with a Web site he called Bad Dog. Then the school put his dog in the pound, and his computer programming teacher was disciplined. Conrad Sykes, 16, created a Web site that bypassed the district's Internet content filter, which was hampering student research, the student said. Sykes said he did this so students could access research sites - but it also allowed students to visit adult sites or others that the school district intends to screen out. Sykes' site was so successful that many Spokane Public School students - and people from as far away as Alabama and Pennsylvania - used it thousands of times between Dec. 14 and Feb. 22. Sykes was even asked by his computer teacher, Wes Marburger, to make a presentation to other classes on the number of visitors to his Web site. The district filter is called Bess, and a dog is in the logo. In the end, Sykes was suspended for two days in February for violating school computer use policies. His teacher was given a written reprimand and removed from teaching computer classes. The state Office of Professional Practices is now investigating and could potentially take away Marburger's teaching certificate. [...] Brown said the Web site used a domain name from the Turks and Caicos Islands nation, which probably sold its domain to Internet companies. District investigators read in great detail on Sykes' blog how he built the site. They're also watching for similar proxy sites. "Our primary goal is to protect the students as best we can and protect the computer environment of the district," Brown said. David Burt, a spokesman for Secure Computing, the company that supplies Bess to about 16 million high school students nationally, said there have been issues in the past of students learning to get past the software. Technologically advanced teens set up proxies but they never last long, Burt said. [...] *David Burt * Public Relations Manager *Secure Computing® * /Securing connections between people, applications, and networks™/ www.securecomputing.com <http://www.securecomputing.com/> NASDAQ: SCUR 1-206-892-1130 (Direct Phone) 1-800-971-2622 (Main Phone) 1-206-683-9508 (Mobile Phone) 1-206-834-1788 (Fax) David_Burt@private <mailto:David_Burt@private> * * *Secure Computing Corporation, Seattle Office* 900 Fourth Avenue, Suite 3600 Seattle, WA 98164 USA _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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