2009/5/6 Thomas Bächler <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> I am an university student so I can use from 08AM to 07PM (GMT+1) the
>> wireless connection at my university but it is over HTTP proxy: I will
>> cannot use ssh/cvs/git/ftp/irc/jabber protocols.
>>
>> I hope to be totally active soon.
>
> You should complain about that. In my eyes, having internet access without
> these basic services is no internet access at all, and whoever the admin is
> (or the guy who tells the admin what to do) is a moron that still lives in
> the past.
>
That's pretty normal in Italian universities. They tend to lock you
out from everything, sometimes because they fear what you could do and
sometimes because of nearly-fascist laws that would oblige them to log
everything. Filtering out is easier, and it really helps with
bureaucracy.
That said, I once managed, as a student, to meet the whole IT team in
my university, and in an official encounter I demanded to open at
least some more ports... You see, there are exams where you *have* to
use CVS/SVN for your projects, and the ports are filtered out from the
inside. It's not an annoyance, it's just plain stupid: you often work
with people who live very far from the city and you can't work
together at the university.
Well, they refused to open ports citing legislations, the need to
filter p2p apps, the heaviness of level 7 filters... Heck, we didn't
even have IMAP! I told them that, with https open, we could tunnel
everything where we wanted. They know it and don't care, because it's
a really small niche of students that can do it. I can assure you that
I was very, very tempted to write an easy to use tunneling app and
publish it for all the students to use.
This is the situation in a country that is in the G8 ("economic power"
my ass) for unknown reasons... old tech, misunderstandings and
censorship.
Sorry for the rant.
Corrado
