[drbawb]

When I was in school, I remember several websites would submit their password as a query string. (Meaning the URL would have &password in it somewhere.)

These sites were blocked because pASSword was a "bad word." The filter would also catch most queries that would tell you how to circumvent the filters. (Back then, just using HTTPS versions of sites was usually enough to get past them.)

The best part was: while searching about proxies / changing proxy settings was disallowed -- the computers themselves were dumb terminals that could connect to a remote server using VNC, RDP, and some proprietary Citrix protocol.

If you knew how to switch TTYs on Linux (Ctrl+Alt+1-7) you could get to a debug menu where you could enter any IP and protocol combination you wanted. (TTY2 had a root shell running busybox... the machines were imaged each time you booted though.)

For my last two years I simply connected to my home machine running VNC and browsed the Internet completely unfettered. (Plus I could remotely control my machine: so many times I would start long running downloads at the beginning of the school day.)

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Back then, though, these filters were laughably naive. I'm amazed that it was deemed acceptable to use a system that has to be _overridden_ for students to research for their science classes.