alex.mullr.net/blog

Oh c'mon, National Express. Surely you’ve learnt by now that outright blocking stuff isn’t the answer. It doesn’t really prevent it, and actually just pisses people off. Really, your Wi-Fi can’t deal with a minute long YouTube video? A DNS lookup later, and…

Blocking by domain name. Clever.

So, so frustrating that they block this 4MB YouTube download, but won’t try to stop me updating my browser (30MB) or downloading some video podcasts (~100MB).

Comments

By Michael Henley on 23 June 2009 at 12:55:

We need to set up a VPN on some hosting somewhere. Avoids this entire procedure.

By Bryant Tan on 24 June 2009 at 19:29:

At SPS we’re using Hotspot Shield (free VPN service):

http://hotspotshield.com/

It’s pretty useful, especially seeing as I think the school’s blocked remote desktop, FTP and VNC (even on non-standard ports) which means I really need Hotspot shield to do anything useful. Annoyingly my laptop’s MAC address has got blocked as well, which also means in order to get anything useful out of the school’s network I have to change my mac address and do everything through VPN. Effort…