User:Abwayax/Projects/Abwayaxguard

Abwayaxguard is a series of programs designed to counter a serious problem in the network configuration of Abwayax's school district's computers.

The Problem

To start off: Like most school district, the one where the school Floppy, Blade, and I go has a proxy filtering system. All requests over the internet are sent through their proxy, which uses Websense filtering technolgies to block certain sites which are inappropriate for school use, including myspace, "adult" sites, game sites, hacking sites and the like (see full description here*. They've even blocked Google Image Search because it can serve pornographic content (Dudes, that's what "SafeSearch" is there for ).

Unfortunately, our district does not do a fair job of monitoring students' activities on school computers. Yes, they do have remote administration capabilities (I've seen my Computer Science teacher spying on one of her students' computers during seventh period), and they have something called "Deep Freeze" (which keeps people from saving stuff onto the hard drive - although they can use the U: hard disk anyway :/), however the districts' computers have nothing to prevent students from modifying the Internet Explorer proxy settings to bypass the Websense filter.

Apparently some uber-smart kid in our school figured this out, and the knowledge trickled downwards towards the likes of FloppyDiskMan and I (who are exceptionally good with computers), then further downwards to (practically) the rest of our school. There are people during eighth block who simply go into Proxy Settings and then straight to MySpace. >>;[1]

Attempts at Solving the Problem

All three solutions have the following problems in common themselves:

• Since they ran in an infinte loop, they tend to be CPU hogs.
• They are vunlerable to death by Windows Task Manager.

4 and 5 will be attempts to fix these problems, especially the second one.

Abwayaxguard 1

This program, while running in the background, periodically reset the "Proxy" key in the registry to the default setting provided by the district. This program was flawed in that modifying the registry key might not necessarily update all the instances of Internet Explorer of the changed settings, which means that any IE instances that have changed proxy settings will be unaffected by the program (as well as any user who doesn't use Internet Explorer at all, such as one who happens to have Firefox Portable). In addition, it was vulnerable to the Task Manager. It was written in Visual Basic.

Abwayaxguard 2

This program, instead of trying to monitor the registry, detects and minimizes any "Local Area Connection" window that the user tries to open (I believe, to be safe, it also closed Firefox's variation of that window). This program is flawed because then people could use RegEdit to change the settings. Additionally, it too was vulnerable to Task Manager. It was also written in Visual Basic.

Abwayaxguard 3

Upon startup, this program copied itself to 3 locations and started all three copies of itself. Depending on the name of the program file, the program will either monitor the registry (a la Abwayaxguard 1) or minimize any "Local Area Connection" windows (Abwayaxguard 2). Additionally, each copy of the program checks to make sure its brothers are running and restarts any brothers that were killed by Task Manager. This was meant to solve the Task Manager problem the last two had, but TMOE discovered that you could kill the entire family with one click by using "End Process Tree". So long, Abwayaxguard 3. This one was written in C++.