Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

Does your university censor /. too?

[mcmonkey (96054)]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Re:

[Ant P. (974313)]

I tried to read one of the articles on censorship in college today, and got blocked. Not sure what sets off that filter crap, but it stops a lot of people getting any real work done here.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY

[shawb (16347)]

What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?

To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Even if your University is in the minority, it is part of a disturbing trend.

Most of those filters are designed for corporate or under-18 environments.

Universities have wildly different needs.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[abscissa (136568)]

If anything, Universities (and libraries) should at least be the ONE place on earth where the Internet should never be censored under any, any any any circumstances!!

Although your suggestion that there is a 19-24 age group that is super-responsible is kind of funny :-)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[RexRhino (769423)]

What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Flounder (42112)]

Political correctness is another matter, and not really relevant to this discussion.

Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??

Re:

[RexRhino (769423)]

Political correctness IS relevant to the discussion. Political Correctness is a form of censorship. The premise of political censorship it that it is "good" censorship. That is is promoting "correct" ideals politically, and so it isn't bad like the other kinds of censorship. But the whole point of "Political Correctness" is to ban or supress "bad" ideas, and only let people express "good" ideas.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[RDW (41497)]

Perhaps University should be the place where any intelligent net user should learn how to circumvent this sort of thing (an increasingly important academic skill!). Actually, it's pretty simple. All you need to do is [Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to the rest of this comment at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Proxy Avoidance" is filtered]

Re:

[Mard (614649)]

Replace "[Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to the rest of this comment at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Proxy Avoidance" is filtered]" with "Torpark" and you have the solution I've started using on my college campus. Runs from a USB drive and runs circles around the filters they use on our computers, at least. [torrify.com]

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[statusbar (314703)]

BTW You can use the anti-internet filtering proxy provided free by my "Internet Filter" [www.internetfilter.com] at:

https://proxy.internetfilter.com/access.cgi [internetfilter.com]

--jeffk++

Re:

[statusbar (314703)]

The irony if that happens is that they would be blocking their competitors websites!

Read about the non-filtering proxy filter on internetfilter.com at peacefire's blog:

• http://www.peacefire.org/blog/?p=4 [peacefire.org]

--jeffk++

Key word

[daveschroeder (516195)]

"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.

But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits [wisc.edu] are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.

Even during the heyday of Napster [wisc.edu], the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.

[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.

Shrug

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...

Re:Shrug

[UbuntuDupe (970646)]

Well, what's different about this is it's not even accomplishing any particular goal. Is it keeping out "naughty" sites? Er, some yes, and some no. Is it keeping out newspaper sites? Er, some yes, some no. Is it keeping out bandwidth hogs? Er, kinda in the sense that it makes internet use a nightmare. But it prohibits an itty bitty mp3 clip of of the wumpasaurus's mating call for my zoology class (hypothetical, people!) just as much as a 14 Mb mp3 at PIRATEYOURMP3SHERE.COM. Plus, it seems to clip out vital parts of websites that *are* acceptable. Kinda like what happens when you do javascript block + ad-related url-block, except that you can't turn it off by changing settings on your software!

So, it's more imcompetence than malice.

Re:Shrug

[AxelBoldt (1490)]

It's a private university. They can do what they want.

True and completely besides the point. The first question is "Should an institution dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No"; the second question is "Do many institutions dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No."

Narrow thinking

[BWJones (18351)]

Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.

I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.

I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs [utah.edu]) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.

It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.

Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?

Re:Narrow thinking

[daveschroeder (516195)]

I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.

I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project [wisc.edu] for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here [wisc.edu]), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.

Re:Narrow thinking

[BWJones (18351)]

Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.

As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either. :-)

Re:

[TopShelf (92521)]

I wonder if this CIO came from a corporate background, and is unfamiliar with collegiate ways. Long ago when I used to work in a university environment, we had an IT manager come in from the outside world, and he wanted to start maintaining web traffic logs by employee, snoop email, etc. A buddy of mine who was a network administrator underneath him told me about the meeting they had with the university's personnel department to review the new policy.

He said the personnel director basically went white whe

This is most certainly NOT a trend

[frequnkn (632597)]

I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ [educause.edu] website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.

censorship makes you liable

[TheMCP (121589)]

I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.

It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.

Blocking porn?

[Skevin (16048)]

> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.

My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why

Not odd

[AnotherBlackHat (265897)]

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn,

Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

Limits on Bandwidth, not Content

[paladinwannabe2 (889776)]

My school did not block any websites that I was aware of. What it did do is throttle bandwidth to students who used to much of it (if you downloaded too many gigs of stuff in a single day, you would get your bandwidth throttled down to Dial-up speeds for a day or two, and then it would reset). The bandwidth levels were high enough that you could play video games online all day without reaching your limit- unless you were downloading several movies a day, you weren't going to be affected.

Art Class

[Dekortage (697532)]

As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights [ibiblio.org], you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.

Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus [artchive.com], which... what the hell?"

I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.

I'm an admin at a private university

[omega9 (138280)]

university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees

That's what filters do. That means they're working. The important piece that molds the context of this comment is how "content" is defined.

and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study

In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.

Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked.

Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts [ea.com], in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways.

Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.

Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?

I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?

Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.

Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .

And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).

I'm betting you haven't:

• Thought, at length, about how the internet can both help and hurt your students, both during and away from class.
• Recorded specific examples of sites or resources you can't reach and why they would make a justifiable, positive impact on your class.
• Met with your local IT staff to discuss your specific examples and discover what can be done about providing access to them.

Re:

[mgblst (80109)]

You are treating everyone like children, in that they need to come and ask you for some specific access. Who are you to decide what is ok? Just because you can restrict access, does not mean that you should - these are important decisions, too important for them to be made by a Systems Admin - sorry, you are abusing your power. Why should I have to prove the merit of something to you?? Do you not see this as ridiculous?

The best thing students can do is make a lot of noise. Write to your local papers, your l

Ridiculous

[porcupine8 (816071)]

I've had computer access at five universities in the past two years, and none do anything like this. Each in a different state, three private, two public, all in the top 50 (USN&WR), all but one in the top 20. Maybe it's common, but not at good schools. Which schools does your CIO really want to emulate?

Re:Sounds Like...

[rundgren (550942)]

RTFS! How is the Village Voice and anatomy sites high bandwidth?

Re:Sounds Like...

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?''

If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.

Re:

[jdavidb (449077)]

That's why I went to UTA in Texas, where there was no football team at all. Of course, every year, some "involved" freshman would write editorials in the school paper about why we needed one, launch a campaign for "student government" (why should those people have control over me?), etc., trying to get a football program restarted, but they never found enough support to win, and I suppose eventually they always went on to a sports/party university like they wanted so the rest of us could stay and do what w

Re:Sounds Like...

[rolfwind (528248)]

This is censorship. The college I go to blocks all the slashdot articles pertaining to games for some reason, even though there is a Video Games degree in this very school.

I often find that useful articles with algorithms or techniques get blocked this way.

One would think that the obnoxious handholding stops after highschool......

le porn

[Jett (135113)]

I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.

Re:

[xappax (876447)]

Furthermore, many things that would be considered pornography are the subject of legitimate study in the arts, social sciences, and media studies. Hell, there are social psych courses that have involved the use of deliberately explicit pornography to produce "shock reactions". There's really very little you can get away with censoring at a university, because almost any information in the world is being researched about and analyzed by someone.

Re:Sounds Like...

[jythie (914043)]

It does more to attract paying students, but not nessesarily 'good' students.

I would be very surprised if 'foodball stadium' listed high on the reasons for attending among the students who go on to do well in ways that reflect on the university.

Re:Sounds Like...

[maetenloch (181291)]

Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.

Re:Sounds Like...

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.

Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.

Re:Sounds Like...

[cyber-dragon.net (899244)]

When I was looking at schools I actually took this into consideration. A schools focus on sports VS academics was a major deciding factor actually. The more interest in and money spent on sports the less interested I was in that campus. It showed a distinct flaw in the thinking of the administration that I knew, even at 16, would perpetuate into the rest of the campus. Are MIT and CalTech known for football? Nope. Do they even have teams? Who knows and who cares. That is not why one goes to college. Either of those schools on your resume and no one will care if you went to a football game or not. Sports programs should be required to live and die on their own, with NO school funding coming out of my tuition I was working two jobs to pay.

Before you think this perspective is born out of being a "geek" who never played sports etc, I was on the varsity swim team starting freshman year and JV football team for two.

Re:

[Deviant Q (801293)]

Are MIT and CalTech [sic] known for football? Nope.

What are you talking about!?! Our football team is undefeated since 1993 [caltech.edu]! :-P

Re:

[Morphine007 (207082)]

Yes, like Royal Military College in Canada: 137.94.0.0 to 137.94.255.255 -- go nuts

By the way, a military institution, beholden to the vast majority of the most fucked up government rules imaginable, blocks absolutely nothing. Monitor, yes; block, no. I could surf for the naked pictures of Taco's mom to my heart's content and not get blocked once. Though the admins might have something to say about what I was looking at.

To the OP, tell your CIO they're just as much of a joke as the school IS is becoming..

Re:The good old days

[DragonWriter (970822)]

There was a time when information was distributed with books. Students would read them and learn... Too much to ask?

Yeah, and I supposed if you lived before computers and heard of a university prohibiting students access to books that most people had access to and that would be educationally useful, you'd dismiss it with comment about how people used to get their knowledge transmitted orally from the elders, and would it be too much to ask if students just went back to doing that...

Re:The good old days

[King_TJ (85913)]

Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.

She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.

I maintain that the content is what's important ... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.

With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.

Re:The good old days

[kalidasa (577403)]

The problem isn't the technology, it's the way it has been used. The expense of printing made it necessary for publishers to maintain some minimum level of quality (sometimes very minimum) if they expected to make enough sales to remain solvent. Nowadays, everyone can "publish" - so one needs to be very well trained to know how to perform research on the internet properly (which most teachers do not know how to do and so cannot teach their students how to do, which ultimately means they discourage it out of a certain level of ignorance).

Re:

[porcupine8 (816071)]

Too much to ask me to limit my research to the physical holdings of my school's library? To have to wait weeks for an inter-library loan for any other material that might be important for a big paper? Hells yes. Nearly all decent academic journals are online now, and there's no possible reason for me to waste time physically tracking down articles in the library if I don't have to.

Re:has this universityh eard fo "academic freedom"

[antifoidulus (807088)]

Way to turn your anecdote into a culture war! This is a small, PRIVATE college in San Antonio. I don't really think it is part of a larger trend. The OP didn't mention it, but for all we know it could be a religious institution. How many small private colleges are you talking about in Canada?


Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

" 1) the students are prevented from leaving campus to search for information ..."

Safety, weather, amd transportation are ways someone is prevented from leaving campus.

"2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. "

"I can't speak for every university, but the private university I attended never had a hard copy version of the Village Voice or other such material on campus (my college years were pre-internet). If I wanted such material, I had to go off-campus to get it

Re: part of a disturbing trend?

[mamer-retrogamer (556651)]

I have to deal with WebSense on a daily basis. Yes, "proxy avoidance" sites are blocked, but only ones that they know about. The solution is simple: create your own proxy server outside of the filtered network--and keep it secret.

The way I did it was download CGIProxy [jmarshall.com] from my home computer and dropped into the cgi-bin directory of an unfiltered remote webserver that I control. Now whenever some seemingly arbitrary site is blocked (usually under the category of "Personal Sites"), I just go to my own personal (and secret) proxy server and enter the blocked URL. Note: you may have to change all text instances of the word "proxy" within the CGIProxy file to something else for it to work.

MP3 blocking is a little harder to get around, but is possible as WebSense only looks at the extension after the last dot of the filename. The solution is to have your proxy respond to a "fake" URL like "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3.prx" and have it pipe the real file located at "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3" through the fake URL. I've modified my copy of CGIProxy to do just that, and it works like a champ.

Of course, all this information is for educational purposes only. ;)

SSH + Firefox is even better

[Gopal.V (532678)]

If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.

Get corkscrew [agroman.net] and use the following in your .ssh/config

host homebox
hostname "fubar.kicks-ass.org" # my old host
port 443
ProxyCommand "~/bin/corkscrew proxy.work.com 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/http_auth"

ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").

Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).

And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)

PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)

Re:

[StikyPad (445176)]

...that anyone would presume that any single institution could provide all of the information and references on any given topic. Aside from such thinking being the the characteristic trait of pompousness, it's also dangerously fallacious. We're not talking about elementary school here, where no amount of additional information will help someone learn 2+2. Tertiary education is all about moving beyond the basics and exploring the limits, and those limits are constantly being expanded by different people i