Ethics of Proxy Servers? 194
Mav asks: "I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising. After querying them about how they knew the site would produce traffic they stated the site was going to be running PHPProxy (an open source web proxy). The traffic was a result of him and his contacts (nearly one thousand of them) using the site to bypass his school's firewall in order to view their MySpace pages and get access to their MSN messengers. Given all the attention social networking sites have recently received and the various laws attempting to block or control access to them I feel guilty and unsure making this available. Are there legal implications that I need to worry about? Could I be held liable if one of the students got in trouble? Most importantly, what's the moral thing to do?"
Proxy = good (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Leave school stuff to school kids. If you really want to help them out, tell your friend about free proxies that he can find via google, or even better, TORpac. Even better still, tell the spoilt brats to wait until they get home. If you want to earn some more money, either work harder at your present job, or look for a new one.
I don't want to sound blunt, but there's better ways of making a living than facilitating kid's "social networking".
IANAL (Score:3, Interesting)
So I won't comment on the legal aspects. Ask a lawyer.
The moral aspects are easier, because you don't need a degree to argue ethics. Just an over inflated sense of self importance. Check.
Is it moral to do X? Well, that depends, on you, the society you live in and how willing that society is to beat in your head for violating the morality of that society.
Is it moral to have sex with your childeren and then kill them for your own pleasure? I think the general opinion is not.
Is it moral to kill thousands of childeren each and every year because you like to drive to fast/drunk for your own pleasure? Look at the number of childeren killed year in year out because of dangerous driving and I think that the general opinion is yes. Except offcourse nobody will admit it.
Morality is a complex thing and it seems to have a lot to do with whatever the "people" can be bothered to get upset about. Or rather a small group of people can be bothered to shout very loudly about without anyone else shouting back.
It ain't even consistent. On a small scale people might agree on say restricting road speeds near schools, but if you suggest that the speed across the entire town is brought down to a safe limit, or even worse, put up camera's to enforce the speed limit, then you find yourselve with massive opposition. Or at least very loud and that surely means massive.
At the moment you got a "thinkofthechilderen" movement who is very massive, or at least very loud. They say, that it ain't right to let childeren access places like myspace unrestricted. Are they right? Do they even represent a majority of the people? Do you consider what the majority considers to be right, to be right? Note that the "thinkofthechilderen" group can't seem to be bothered by the deaths in traffic wich outnumber the victims of sexual predators.
I myself got the following problem with this idea.
Not to long ago there was a police request for witnesses in a the free dutch newspaper metro or spits about a rape case. A woman returning from a date late at night had been assaulted and raped walking back alone. A comment by a collegue was that her boyfriend should have walked her back.
In a way he was right except that he shouldn't be. Should women be restricted from were and when they can walk because some men are rapists?
Should childeren be banned from socializing online because some people prey on them online?
The next step in that logic is that they asked for it. This is the old sexist way of thinking wich I definitly think is amoral.
So I don't think childeren should be prevented from accessing spaces like myspace. Restrict the criminals, not the victims.
Is it then moral for you to break restrictions against childeren that can be considered by some to be morally wrong.
Well, obviously not. The only thing that could be wrong if you consider breaking that restriction itself to be a morally wrong act.
Like say, you consider it morally wrong to let someone starve to death but your only option would be to steal the food wich you also consider to be morally wrong. A choice of the lesser of two evils.
But I find it hard to consider a proxy to myspace to be morally wrong on its own. Myspace may be wrong, but not on any moral grounds.
Say you provide the access to these childeren. This results in them posting their details on myspace. Someone else uses these details to hunt one down and rape and kill them. Are you then morally to blaim?
That depends on the morals of the person judging you.
Is the boyfriend in the above real example to blaim for not escorting his girlfriend home? Is society as a whole? Is the girl? Or is it just the rapist and nobody else that should be held accountable for what happened?
If you provide access you provide access for, what I would consider, a in itself harmless actions. There are plenty of safe ways to behave on myspace. You do not make these kids behave in an unsafe manner. Part of living is t
Re:I wouldn't do it (Score:5, Interesting)
In terms of legality, you're in the clear for that express purpose only (visiting MySpace.) Anything else might make you liable. I would suggest a click-through.
Also, if the school is anything like the one I worked at, the extent of their blocking will be harvesting visited URLs and looking to see if there are any frequent hits at interesting domain names. However, we never caught small *.mine.nu-type DynDNS addresses unless a teacher explicitly told us, and our job was only to enforce teachers' policies, not make up new ones.
Re:I Don't Know Your Morals (Score:4, Interesting)
"MySpace != information."
No, but 1000 kids accessing it all the time will give you HUGE bandwidth bills.
Add to that the adverts (and the bandwidth for them)
And remember - proxying doubles the bandwidth used - your server has to first fetch the page (as opposed to looking on the local file system) and then it has to send it (after rewriting the page to include YOUR ads ...
Re:I wouldn't do it (Score:3, Interesting)
If you open the hole, people will exploit it. Not everyone is on break at the same time, so you can't poke holes in your firewall at appropriate times, and leaving the ability to access the service begs for someone to use it.
I understand that removing blocking is almost impossible in our current educational and social environment. What I would like to see is user-based security... you log on and your actions online are logged, monitored, tracked, and reported. With that, I would like some additional freedoms to be given -- the ability to access Messenger or other "non-educational" sites and services during your break hours with the understanding that they can monitor your usage, and if you break the rules... they'll know.
With decent monitoring software, the school should be able to identify suspect traffic or inappropriate usage patterns pretty quickly. Are there any firewall/monitoring packages that could build rules around user accounts - LDAP integration or something - and then monitor traffic per user and automatically block certain activities based on a set of rules? Here's my thought.
The student hops on the network and it associated with a user account -- already available.
The student performs a Google search, which is verified against a block list and logged against their account.
The student hops on Messenger, and the firewall checks to see if they're authorized to use the service at all, and then if they are authorized at that time. Permit or deny, it is logged.
The student sets up a proxy server for their Messenger, and tries to connect, and the firewall denies it as Messenger traffic after inspecting the packets.
The student sets up a secure proxy server for their browser, and starts wandering around. They server checks to see if it's an open proxy, and it's not. It allows it.
The student uses the proxy a lot and the firewall's monitoring suite says, "Hey, there's an unusual amount of activity to this unknown site" and flags it for a report.
An administrator inquires after the student, they find the proxy, and he gets his Internet privs locked down to only with specific teacher authorization.
What do you think?
Re:I wouldn't do it (Score:1, Interesting)
One problem is what exactly counts as reasonable. In my case, as a 6th form student (18, last year of school education), I find most of the restrictions to be rather frustrating, due to the way in which things are blocked. Games, social networking sites and such are open and free and unblocked, yet anything with the word 'network' 'administrator' 'security' 'settings' 'connect' and numerous other strange keywords are blocked at the proxy level. This makes it very difficult, considering I am studying computing and am hoping to go on to do Computer Science when I leave school. We can't even access the exam boards specification for the syllabus.
After the IT support people promising to fix it around 2 years ago, and frequent 'we are working on it' messages since, using a proxy is about the only way around, and all I want to do is get a chance to learn and research!
To take the angle that trying to avoid such a proxy is just to play games isn't always true.
Censorware exemption (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:High School (Score:3, Interesting)
But he asked what was the *moral* thing to do.
In which case I would have thought a lawyer would be the last person I would ask...
No, mod parent up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I think your analysis of morality is right on; there is very little point in discussing morality, at least outside of Philosophy classes, because people approach it from radically different angles. People can take the same action for very different reasons, even if they both end up doing the "right thing" as viewed by a third party.
Also, your comment about what's essentially a 'popularity contest' question cloaked in a moral dilemma is right on. If I had to guess, I'd say about 90% of people's "moral dilemmas" are really nothing more than ways of gauging the relative acceptability of various courses of action within their peer groups, and trying to figure out what's going to score them the most points (or damage them the least). This question in particular reeks of "would people hate me if I did x?"
As to the question at hand, I think providing the service would be a bad idea, but for different reasons; students need to learn to solve problems themselves, and not wait for some deus ex machina in the form of an ad-supported service to solve it for them. Left to their own devices, some enterprising young geek will figure out how to get around the filtering by themselves. It's not as if it's very hard -- a CGI reverse-proxy is one way, SSHing to a home computer on Port 80 (with the -D option) is another, there are lots of other methods -- and once they work it out, they can be the heroes of the day to the other MySpace-loving students. By providing a commercial filter-avoidance service, you are stealing the fire from some student who might figure it out themselves. But more importantly than one or two students, you are teaching all the students who use it, that all they have to do when they run into something that's a pain, is wait for someone else to solve the problem and hand it to them. It's the difference between letting them understand that the solution comes from someone else like them, who happens to understand a bit about computers, versus a solution that seems to come down from On High, by way of an anonymous web site ridden with ads.
I am a firm believer that in order to become productive, fully-mature adults, young people need to develop a healthy cynicism towards, and distrust of, authority. Otherwise, they're nothing but little brainless larval consumers, parroting back what they've memorized, and doing what they're told. They need to learn to break the rules on their own, and that they can break the rules on their own. Replacing one authority (whoever runs the filtering) for another (whoever runs the ad-supported reverse-proxy) isn't instructive. Placing an idiotic barrier (like all web-filtering is) in between them and something they want, and letting them get over it themselves, is.
Copyright infringement against MySpace and users (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're way off here. IANAL either but I used to work in intellectual property (patents not copyright however).
You're taking a published work (myspace pages) and creating a derivative of it (myspace pages with your ads instead of theirs). You're undoubtedly opening yourself up to a lawsuit here.
In addition, myspace (I gather) now have agreements to compensate original rights holders for bootleg material on the site, I'm assuming you don't have similar agreements!?
Someone later in this thread (#18050774) says:
>>> "You're supposing that the things that these schools are trying to block access to are not learning."
MySpace??!? There is probably a lot of learning there but I wouldn't think it's key for the majority of high-school students when balanced against the procrastination factor