Amusing Tricks with (and Bypassing) Bess

You probably already know that Bess is the school's software for keeping you from going to inappropriate sites on the web. I have an interesting post about how it might work here. There are a number of fun things you can do with Bess. For example, you can edit the URL from a blocked site so that Bess tells you that another site is blocked. This site won't really be blocked, but it will look like it. For example, I changed the URL of the Bess block site to say that the IH Website was blocked due to "Being Stupid." It was funny to watch Miss Given's surprised reaction when I showed it to her. If you're a nerd, you should have no trouble figuring out how to do this. It's all right in the URL. For the rest of you, come talk to me sometime when we can get on a computer. "Okay, okay," you're thinking. "I don't care about making Bess look dumb. I just want to bypass it." Bess, like any other thing, can be bypassed. Now's a good time to say that I've never bypassed Bess (well, once, but with teacher permission) and you shouldn't either because it's against school rules. If you get in trouble don't blame me. Now that that's out of the way, Bess really isn't hard to bypass. You need to know about ports and CGI proxies before we begin. The nerds among us should feel free to totally ignore me for the next few sentences. A CGI proxy is basically a website that accepts a URL (ex. http://www.ugotgames.com) and returns the contents of that page. In order to block pages, Bess looks at the URL. A CGI proxy can fool it into thinking that the page is allowed. But, CGI proxies can be blocked too. That is what happens to most of them. We can get around this problem by accessing them with different ports. According to Dictionary.com (I suck at definitions), a port is "a logical channel or channel endpoint in a communications system." Basically, it is a way for the computer to carry on multiple "conversations" at once. Ports are refrenced by numbers and there is a set of standards defining the use of the lower numbers. Webservers run on port 80 (or port 443, if they're secure). Luckly for us, Bess only knows how to block port 80. It cannot block port 443. A lot of webservers that collect personal information and all e-commerce sites use port 443. You can tell by looking at the URL. If it starts with http://, it is a normal, non-secure site. If it starts with https://, it is a secure site. Some websites (such as gmail) have HTTPS support and can be accessed directly that way. But most cannot because they don't support secure traffic. For these, you need to use a CGI proxy. The trick is finding a proxy that supports HTTPS. I know a couple. For example, you could use https://nivilca.sytes.net/cgi-bin/nph-proxied.pl. To use that, go to the site above, then type the URL of the site you want to go to in the text box. Then hit Enter. It will be slow, but it will work. That's all I have to say for today. If I left anything out, leave a comment for me. And if Bess learns how to block HTTPS, let me know!