I remember my school network used to block the Sun Java SDK docs, for "hacking"... it made studying for AP computer science interesting. I forget the slightly dodgy vpn/proxy I wound up using to get around that - I think it had fire in its name, and was a super Web 1.0-style site filled with anarcho-libertarian rhetoric.

May Bess rot in hell.

Yep. Or web proxies; I remember one that was disguised as an educational site, but if you entered the right credentials into the "admin area" login, unlocked a PHProxy instance.

This was also what led me to first install Tor.

"start using cgiproxy" used to be all you needed back in my day.

Back in the day I've had a website ranking in the top 3 of Google for "start using cgiproxy". Honestly, I never knew why people would search for such a complicated phrase, but I've found the keyword somewhere and optimized the website for it.

Do you mind telling me why where you searching for that phrase instead of something like "free proxy" or "cgi proxy"?

Free proxy and CGI proxy alone used to generate lots of fake results. As "start using cgiproxy" is the title of a cgiproxy page you'd typically get less false positives.

Not if the filter system you were subjected to attempted to block any URL containing the substring "proxy"... This led to as many false positives as you might expect.

In my era it was all about war dialing and AOHell.

You could also throw the tor browser on a usb stick when i graduated.

Tor doesn't work everywhere. I'd don't know how they did it but it was blocked in my school's computer lab.

Probably just blocked the port.