Some web filtering software that school systems have purchased has an interesting flaw. It occurs between the transfer between domain name server and the actual IP address of a web site.
Web sites use a DNS server that works in the background of your computer, and forwards a visitor to the specific IP address when you place the URL in your browser. If you place the following IP address into your browser http://72.14.253.104 you will go to Google.com. A domain name server converts Google.com to http://72.14.253.104, but you can always use the IP address. It just isn’t feasible to memorize IP addresses, that’s why we have domain names.
It seems that quite a few web sites that have been blocked through filtering software are only being blocked on the domain name level and not by IP address. How can you check if your school or board filter is blocking domain names, as well as IP addresses?
If your web filter blocks http://www.youtube.com try going to http://208.65.153.251 if you can get to the web site then it is obvious what is happening. There are thousands of online tools that will convert a domain name to an IP address in order to test any other web site.
If you are responsible for this software at your school or school board, I suggest you contact your filter provider for questions and resolutions.
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into a tirade, recorded it on cellphones and posted it on youtube. As has been mentioned many times in various discussion around the blogosphere, our feeble attempts as educators to block students from using technology in any number of ways is being proven futile. But still we try: A teacher approached me following a talk I recently gave and said something like, “Jeez, don’t tell all of them about YouTube. We’ve been doing our best to keep it out of our school. We don’t want our teachers and students
this lots of times before, but I just had to share this latest one. Students are bypassing content filters thrown up by school district technology staff using all sorts of ways. But what if one of the ways they did it did not involve violating the AUP? Check this out from Quentin at TeachingHacks.com: Some web filtering software that school systems have purchased has an interesting flaw. It occurs between the transfer between domain name server and the actual IP address of a web site. Web sites use a DNS server that works in the background of your
into a tirade, recorded it on cellphones and posted it on youtube. As has been mentioned many times in various discussion around the blogosphere, our feeble attempts as educators to block students from using technology in any number of ways is being proven futile. But still we try: A teacher approached me following a talk I recently gave and said something like, “Jeez, don’t tell all of them about YouTube. We’ve been doing our best to keep it out of our school. We don’t want our teachers and students
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Bingo… our web filter does not block the you tube IP address. Do you have any other IP addresses that I can check on… like myspace, hotmail, or the like…
From your IP address it looks like the “FLAGSTAFF UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT” has this issue with their web filter. You can find out this information by doing a Google search for “DNS Lookup” and using one of the many tools.