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Comment by ReverseCold | Hacker News Reader

One side effect of schools blocking websites is students downloading and using free VPN software. They have no money, and it works well enough for "unblocking" websites as far as they're concerned. Rip privacy.

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Can you elaborate where you are seeing this? Is this as the post-secondary level or lower? I worked in higher-ed in the US and almost uniformly our institution and those we talked to in mailing lists were adamantly anti-blocking. Remembering back to when I was in HS and our library was outfitted with a few donated computers that shared a 56k connection, I know they had a net-nanny installed, but that was quite some time ago.

Schools blocking stuff is very active still- it's extremely prevalent up to and including high school, and only a handful of colleges do any sort of filtering.

Furthermore, kids find increasingly shady free vpns as IT blocks more and more free vpns.

Lots of kids will use free vpns to get their SAT/ACT/AP scores a day or so early.

wow, thats a good use-case you dont think of often.

> Lots of kids will use free vpns to get their SAT/ACT/AP scores a day or so early.

I don't understand - how does a VPN help there? Are schools actually blocking the websites that publish the test results?

Some standardized test scores are released on different dates depending on the location of your IP (divided into zones like Eastern, Central, Western US, and International).

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