I am a 17 year old college student and my dad has blocked off certain websites on the web, myspace, facebook, gmail, and proxies. He did it because he says I should be spending more time doing homework, but I do it all at school. The school has major firewalls too.

Im tired of it and him watching everything I do, he has all my email passwords and IM account passwords so he can check on me all he wants.

I want to find a way to get out from under it, is it possible for me to mess up our home network or for me to get around all the firewalls?

Or am I being unreasonable?

Please advise, thanks

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Leaving home is the only answer to be honest. There is no fast, undetectable way of getting round the stuff he has in place. However he only has control over your HOME connection. You could get a laptop and a USB data modem. Then you would have your own connection.

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Well, I would say that your dad is being a little to overprotective over you. Tell him to back off and that you are old enough to make your own decisions. Maybe that will give you some freedom, or else, you could learn how to get over the firewall at your house with some techniques that are shown all over the internet. I have the same thing at my school too. All I could do is just try to use online messengers. I really can't help you with that. Sorry.

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Thank you all for the advice, and im gonna talk to him about it and see if we can work something out.

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Which country do you live in?
In several countries, parents are not allowed to contain such information (passwords etc.), it defies your privacy.

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I live in the USA, Virginia to be exact. and I have never heard of a law like that, that would be interesting if we had one.

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There is no such law in any jurisdiction in the United States, so far as I know (and I would likely know). To the earlier anon who suggested this — in which countries are there such laws?

Note that things might be different in some states if the father were actually spying on OP for some purpose other than parental management. Here, however, it's clear that from a legal standpoint, the father is perfectly within his rights.

OP, how knowledgeable is your father about networking? If he is much more knowledgeable than you, well, forget it. However, if he just uses some Windows firewall and doesn't know much about how it actually works, then there are lots of sneaky ways to get around it — hide a proxy on the firewall server operating on a hidden port, for instance. Alternatively, you could get yourself a wireless router for $30 and install Kamikaze (linux) on it. Then connect the router in between the existing router and the WAN connection (modem or whatever) and physically hide it. There are some really small wireless routers out there, so this shouldn't be too hard. You can even leave the original ethernet cable plugged into the original router (just leave it unplugged on one end) as a "ringer" so that nothing looks amiss.

Configure the new router to bridge the connection between the WAN and the old router. Then configure it to run encrypted and not to broadcast its SSID and not to authenticate any MAC addresses other than the one in your own wireless card. (You don't have to be a guru to do these things on kamikaze — it has an easy-to-use gui.)

Now, when you want privacy, just connect to your new router. All of your dad's firewall bullshit is neatly bypassed. Of course, you'll want to use a normal amount of activity on the old router (so things don't look suspicious). Create yourself some new email accounts with some new passwords (don't change the old passwords, because presumably your dad could just force you to disclose them as soon as he discovered it).

This method DOES have the disadvantage in that you don't really have any plausible deniability if the new router is discovered. If you have a next-door friend or neighbor whom you can trust, then simply install your router there. If your friend is too far away for a regular wireless router, but you have something approximating line of sight, you could buy two routers and make a pair of cheap parabolic antennas, and then bridge them together (you'd have to keep the one in your room well-hidden, obviously, but many routers have antenna leads so that you could still connect it to a makeshift antenna). Your dad isn't going to discover this, ever, unless he's savvy enough to sniff the wireless traffic (WPA and WEP aren't worth a shit as far as encryption's concerned). If your dad has this level of knowledge, then you will need to up the ante by configuring your routers with a VPN (an encryption scheme that actually works).

I actually like this idea, because it sounds like some serious Cold-war era KGB shit — imagine OP waking up at night, checking the door, then pulling out a MacGyver-style parabolic antenna from the chest in his closet, affixing it to his windowsill, and then connecting it to a lead from the small router concealed behind the headboard of his bed. Lights flash as the router acquires the signal and leases an IP from the neighbor-friend's ISP. Now OP can accomplish his secret mission — the details are unknown, but the mission probably involves the acquisition of porn of some type. . .

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Get a new email account and don't tell him…

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@68,307

Vice versa - North Va for the win, heh.

Anyways, there's plenty of web-proxies I doubt he's capable of blocking entirely. One I use is Hide5.net when applicable - and for IM/email, merely create new IM/email accounts. If he sniffs your connection, route your email through a proxy and IM either through tor (Beware of end-relay sniffers) or perhaps JAP (Beware of FBI sniffing).

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