[chacham15]

The solution I used to use in high school: add a period to the end of the domain name. E.g. "www.facebook.com" became "www.facebook.com.". Apparently, the last dot does nothing, but gets around almost all pattern matchings. Everyone I told was amazed, but it actually worked (and teachers/administration were clueless).

[notimetorelax]

Here's some nice explanation on that matter: http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html.

Excerpt from the page: "domain name that doesn't have a dot at the end is not fully-qualified and is potentially ambiguous".

[girvo]

My favourite was that http was blocked, but https wasn't at my school. Easy peasy :)

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I use that for a different trick at school. It gets around keyword filtering on search terms :)

[jonmetz]

This type of filtering made the EFF's HTTPSEverywhere common in my last school