I work for internet nazis!!

[EricaH 0]

um, ok

There is no can't. Only lack of knowledge or fear. Only you can fix your fear.

PMS #227 (just like the TV show)

[MochaSkyChick 0]

Quote

Yahoo mail has many foreign mirrored sites. I worked for a company that blocked the mail.yahoo.com, so I just started checking my mail in the Australian and British Yahoo sites. :) There is a way around everything.

Sneaky, sneaky Thanks for the advice.

PMS #62
Zarza R[red

[wingnut 0]

www.proxybeater.com


try that sometime.. it might help depending n whatya want to do...

______________________________________
"i have no reader's digest version"

[Guest]

There are ways around it - 2600.com will show you how.

I don't do them here for the same reasons (fear of dismissal), but you can set up a proxy outside and connect to it with a secure tunnel. With port 80 encrypted and the IP addresses being translated by your proxy, they'll have absolutely no idea where you've been. All they can do at that point is block your proxy IP, forcing you to tunnel through another proxy elsewhere. There are also services I won't mention here that will provide crypto and proxy for a fee.

However, the system you're on belongs to the employers. They own it, they pay for it, they make the rules. If you don't want to play by their rules and don't have the moxie to defy them, you can, as harsh as it sounds, either comply or go elsewhere.

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."

[sunshine 2]

Geesh, i can usually access anything from work. Not getting on dz.com today nearly killed me.

___________________________________________
meow

I get a Mike hug! I get a Mike hug!

[jumprunner 0]

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what do they expect me to do here? WORK?

Yep, thats the response youre going to get if you complain about it. Sucks!!!

[GigaBuist 0]

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Actually, you can... but the math involved isn't simple, and I'm the wrong guy to try to explain it...

_Am

I'll don my Commander Geek hat here and try and whittle through this one.

Computer's on the internet use an IP (Internet Protocol) address to identify themselves. It's a 4 byte number. For the sake of geeks around the world we chose to break them up into four pieces though and call it a "dotted quad".

When you go to www.dropzone.com your browser really doesn't know WTF that is, so it has to resolve that address into an IP before it can actually make the request. The IP address for dropzone.com is:

64.69.64.224

So, if you type in http://64.69.64.224 into your browser window you get to dropzone.com and skip that whole pesky resolution process in the step. Given the scope of this tutorial I'll skip the whole issue of using the HTTP Host: header to do name based virtual hosting... it's even less exciting than this.

Back the whole dotted quad thing, each number between the dots represents one byte of the IP address. A byte is 8 bits (which are either 1 or 0) which gives you a maxium range of 0-255 (2 to the 8th power). That's why you'll never seen an IP like 300.100.200.400... the bits just can't be toggled that way.

Now, while we like to think of them as four seperate numbers they really are one number. They mash together at the IP layer and form a single 4 byte (32 bit) number which has a range of 0-4,294,967,296 or 2 to the 32nd power. Yes I had to use a calculator for that one.

Now we delve into the binary number system. We're so used to base 10 that this sometimes takes a bit getting used to. When you write "10" is in base ten what you're saying is you have one ten and zero ones. The right most digit means 1's, the next left is 10's and the next 100's and so on. Each place represents the number counted for a new power of ten.

210 really means: (10^2 * 2) + (10^1 * 1) + (10^0 * 0). I use the ^ notation here to represent "the next number is an exponent".

Once you go to the binary system where a place is either on or off each the right most position now becomes the number of 2^0 units you have, the next 2^1, and the next 2^2 and so on. The digit 2 never exists in this system though because you can't represent that number. Imagine only having one finger on each hand at this point and trying to count. For zero you show no fingers. For one you show a finger on your right most hand (take your pick as to which one) and for two you show a finger on your left hand but none on the right. For a three you hold up both fingers.

So, 64.69.64.224 when taken one chunk at a time in binary is:

01000000 = 64 (1 * 64)
01000101 = 69 (1 * 64 + 1 * 4 + 1 * 1)
01000000 = 64 ( 1 * 64)
11100000 = 224 (1 * 128 + 1 * 64 + 1 * 32)

Mash them together and you get:

01000000010001010100000011100000 ... and this is starting to make my head hurt a little bit.

The numbers you say above were decimal numbers that represent an IP address. Humans like numbers in base 10 -- we have 10 fingers assuming no birth defects of accidents. Shop teachers down to one thumb at each hand must be naturals at binary numbers. I am not. I get lost after a while.

Now that you've played in the realm of binary numbers, and probably want to cut my head off for putting math in this forum, we'll go one one more number system before the answer is revealed. Take a moment and grab yourself a beer -- you've earned it at this point.

Lets's look at the dotted quad again, and break it down into a number system of sorts. We'll treat is like a base 256 number system even though we use more than one symbol per "digit" in this case.

64 units of 256^0 (1)
69 units of 256^1 (256)
64 units of 256^2 (65,536)
224 units of 256^3 (16,777,216)

You add them all up (using a calculator again here....) and you get:

3,758,096,384 + 4,194,304 + 17,664 + 64 = 3,762,308,416

Along with a headache. So, now when you type in http://3762308416 and assuming you use a browser that can handle such a number (mine can't -- Galeon) then you'll eventually get to your destination.


So, now that I've bored everybody to death and you've skipped this post I'll continue on explaining why this actually gets around your workplaces proxy server and gets you into what you want to see.

The web as we know is based off the HTTP protocol. RFC number 2068 to be found at http://www.ietf.org if you really want to read the whole thing. What happens when you make a web (HTTP) request:

Your machine jacks open a connection on port 80 (typically) to the destination machine and sends some mumbo-jumbo over to it that looks like this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host:
< and more stuff we don't care about here >

That part that goes after Host: is what you typed into your address bar, or at least the host/domain name of the site. www.dropzone.com would be what goes there when you hit this site. The /cgi-bin/forums/etc. part gets chopped off.

So, your proxy server intercepts this call and looks at what you have in the Host: position and does a lookup on this to determine if you're looking for naughty stuff... or at least that's the only manner in which I assume products such as SmartFilter can work. I don't have source code to them, nor do I care to.

Even though I work for a company that uses SmartFilter, and are German owned (making the Nazi reference funnier for me), I've never bothered doing this to get around the proxy. Sometimes it bugs me, sometimes it doesn't. When my boss was showing me the SmartFilter's magic on my first day of work (he also hates it) he plops http://www.playboy.com into the address bar of his browser to show me the typical error message only to discover that the SmartFilter was temporarily down. Ooops.

Now, I remove my Commander Geek hat and fetch another beer.

[BlueEyedMonster 0]

And this is one of MANY reasons I hate math.

[EricaH 0]

since that gave me a migrane... & I don't want to be fired, i'll just continue to be frustrated - that's better than not having health insurance. @ least health insurance pays for the drugs that help relieve frustration - well in a roun'bout way .

thank you so very, very much for all of everyone's information! jeesh - so many smart people on here

There is no can't. Only lack of knowledge or fear. Only you can fix your fear.

PMS #227 (just like the TV show)