[HN Gopher] Upside-Down-Ternet (2007)
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       Upside-Down-Ternet (2007)
        
       Author : geocrasher
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2022-05-10 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ex-parrot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ex-parrot.com)
        
       | AdamJacobMuller wrote:
       | SSL ruined this.
       | 
       | I did this for fun a while back in our office.
       | 
       | We had some people who would burn too much time on social media,
       | so, they got added to a special rule on the `pf` firewall
       | surrounding the office which blurred all images from selected
       | sites, like facebook. I blurred instead of something more obvious
       | like blocking or inverting the images since it was designed to
       | counter casual use and was more amusing. Anybody who couldn't
       | evade my trivial firewall block shouldn't have been working
       | there.
       | 
       | I remember watching logs and I would progressively ratchet up the
       | blur level if it wasn't effective enough.
       | 
       | I terminated the experiment when an employee casually told me he
       | had an appointment at the eye doctor because it was getting hard
       | to see his computer screen, it would never get any better than
       | this.
        
       | Alan_Dillman wrote:
       | I remember when this was knew, thinking, "Its so cool, but too
       | technical for me to do!" Now it would be, "meh, I've done
       | harder".
       | 
       | Thanks for the wonderful memories.
        
       | glitchcrab wrote:
       | My manager at my last job actually did this to one of his good
       | friends many years ago after I showed this article to him -
       | whenever the friend was using my manager's WiFi any images would
       | be upside down, or blurred etc etc. He took great delight in
       | telling me that the friend had even reinstalled his OS to try and
       | solve it.
       | 
       | A couple of years later, said friend actually joined the company.
       | I used to take great delight in dropping occasional obscure hints
       | and comments, but he never did figure it out.
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | Cute, but would presumably be a lot less effective these days
       | between HTTPS, JS dynamic loading of everything, and VPNs?
        
         | JonathonW wrote:
         | The transparent proxy wouldn't care whether images are being
         | dynamically loaded or not; it'll flip any image it sees (as
         | long as it's a GIF or JPEG, in this example).
         | 
         | But HTTPS breaks it completely; that's kind of the point (can't
         | MITM a TLS connection on a computer you don't control without
         | certificate errors popping up).
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-10 23:00 UTC)