SSH Tunneling

I think AISD is taking the wrong approach by restricting the internet at school. The content filters at school often get in the way of students who are looking to do actual work. Recently, I've run into a ton of restrictions while trying to complete assignments. It seems as if AISD is simply restricting more and more, and not checking their own policies. For example, recently, I was trying to create the game tic-tac-toe in javascript. However, every time I looked up tutorials, I found myself blocked by the "this site contains games content" filter. Another example would be the time I was working on a project for Great Ideas on Gender Discrimination in Primetime TV Shows. I found myself unable to look up even plot summaries of TV shows at school, because AISD was being paranoid. Control over what students do in class should be given to the teachers, and not blanket banned by the district.

A common solution to these problem would be the use of proxies or TOR, but both are blocked by the ever vigilant AISD. A solution that I think might work would be SSH Tunneling. It creates a secure "tunnel" between your network and another client, which allows a user to do things as the other computer. It's really useful for network administrators, who often need to securely access a remote server and run commands from that server. It can also be used as a form of secure file transfer, using the tunnel to transfer not only data/commands but also files. But the part that may be most applicable would be its use as a proxy. Since the user is routing traffic through another router, they are able to access the internet through the unblocked router.

An SSH tunnel is one of the best ways to bypass a firewall because it's difficult to block. Since many network administrators use SSH tunneling themselves, most organizations choose to not block that vital port, and thus using SSH as a proxy works.