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Kids outsmart Web filters

Last November, Ryan, a high-school sophomore, figured out a way to outsmart the Web filters on a school PC in order to visit the off-limits MySpace.com while doing "homework" in the computer lab.

A teacher eventually spotted the social network on the screen in front of "Ryan," a fictitious name for a real student attending school in Phoenix, Ore., a small town with a population of about 5,000. The teacher flagged the activity for the school's technology expert, who then followed Ryan's tracks online through the school network.

Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that allow users to access other sites through them.)"

This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.

Lynn Beebe, school counselor Web proxies are almost as old as the Internet itself as a means to route Web traffic through an anonymous domain name or circumvent content-filters, and they've long been the territory of corporate networks and the tech savvy seeking privacy. Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering technology providers.

Proxies are just one of many tricks that kids use to break locks put on forbidden material--a pursuit of almost any young generation. As more schools place tight controls on PCs to stop kids from file-sharing, instant messaging, social networking or looking at undesirable material online, the kids are getting more clever, tech experts say.

Google, by far the most popular search site, has a "safe search" feature, for example, that filters out adult material. But kids can circumvent those filters by viewing "cached" links or thumbnail images to look at inappropriate material, experts say. Teens also trick filters by typing in misspelled words or modern slang to retrieve links to racy material. Translation sites Babelfish or Google Translate can deliver sites like Playboy.com translated from another language.

"It's going to be the constant battle. No matter what you put up, kids are going to work around it," said Lynn Beebe, a school counselor in Scotts Valley, Calif. Her school, for example, uses filters to block all sites with the word or subject "blog," in addition to other sites.

But there's no foolproof solution. Beebe said that a small population of boys at the school use their free time to play games online. Sometimes they've shared with her that when they mistakenly type in a URL, an undesirable site appears, she said.

A more popular avenue for teens on school PCs is to visit any one of thousands of Web proxy sites such as Proxify, Guardster.com and Proxy.org to call up banned sites without notice, according to filtering companies.

Proxies can get trickier.

"A far more difficult problem to deal with is when they download a piece of software on their home computer, using a CGI script to (access content). Our product doesn't recognize it as a known domain, because it's just going through their home computer," said Sanders.

Web sites like Freeproxy point visitors to many free downloadable applications like "Hidemyass.com" that let kids work around content filters in a more surreptitious way. Teen blogs can also be found that point kids to proxies for school filters.