Escapaing the system: Introduction to Proxies

If you ask me, most school and corporate policies on network monitoring and filtering are totalitarian and excessively pervasive. The Right is so concerned with silly traditional values and keeping objectionable content away from their vanilla-bland offspring that most corporations, by default, coerce their system administrators to violate one of the core guarantees of the Internet.

A few weeks ago, three Chinese guys submitted a draft to the IETF. They proposed a laughable system in which each country controlled its own DNS namespace, so that each municipality had autonomy over the resolution of domain names for the sake of keeping up with the “fast development of the Internet” as if we had to split up the Internet into parts because it is getting too big. Read the draft if you’d like, for some good laughs.

Jokingly or not, the concept is the same at a smaller scale. It has already, to some extent, been made into reality.

For us millennials, web proxies will forever be part of our secondary school culture as long as the older generation maintains their foolish padded-playground ideologies. Unblocked web proxies were gems in primary school, like a covert gateway to all of the fun on the Internet. But as you get older, proxies start to take on different meanings and purposes.

From my experience with largely-useless Microsoft Certifications and linux server administration, I offer you this wisdom:

As good practice, I use squid to run my own HTTP proxy on my home media server, as well as a SSH daemon for other purposes. That way, I’ll have them if I ever again need to deal with restrictive internet policies.