My fiance is a high school teacher at a local public school. Even though the school is one of the highest rated in Canada, and has some of the most technologically advanced equipment, faculty and students, it isn't immune from being a fountain of WTF.
Last year, the school board decided that the Internet was just far too dangerous of a place for students. This was partially due to knee-jerk reactions to videos posted on YouTube some pumpkin-eater that filmed himself bullying another kid. The Internets must be cleaned! (Personally, if someone wants to post evidence of their own wrong doing in a public place, using computers that run through a school board's network that is chock-full of logging and tracking mechanisms-- I say more Darwin-based power to that person. It'd make it easier, not harder, for them to incriminate themslves).
Anyways, their solution, after consulting with some highly paid consultants, was Bess. Bess is a standard Think Of The Children (TOTC) software package. It's installed on the board servers, and acts as a both a proxy and a filter. It will keep students from viewing "inappropriate" material.
If you can't see where this is going, then you weren't around for AOL's "support" of the Breast Cancer Survivor's Group back in the 90s.
Bess, or "Bessy" as the staff started calling her, as to invoke the image of a horribly out of touch, senile old woman in a rocking chair, was put on the network and started doing her thing. She was pre-loaded with a list of naughties, but Bessy could also learn. She could inspect the content of requests (read: packet inspection!) and start to figure out newier, naughtier sites that are a might sight unright.
The first thing to go on the "lump of coal" list was 90% of Google. If you log into Gmail, you're blocked because of "chat programs" (Gchat) or "document storage" (Google Docs). This left several teachers scratching their heads wondering a) how documents were inappropriate and b) how the hell were they going to download their Google Doc-based lesson plan for the day.
The next thing to go down was YouTube. Oddly enough, though, it came back with "custom block: inappropriate". My fiance and her co-workers, who are all science teachers, were especially frustrated over this one as the kids had an assignment to complete: watch a series of educational films that were posted to YouTube. How could Bessy block it? Well, she didn't, directly. No, that was the principal. You see, the micomanaging principal browser through the usage logs, and happened to notice there was a sudden increase in traffic going to YouTube. Rather than wonder if it was students accessing the video that had been in the lesson plan for several semesters now, she instead exercised her "exectuvie privillage" and blocked all of YouTube. But it's okay, if you want access to YouTube you can just write down the name of the webpage, put it on an official form, file it with her secretary and in three days you can have access for that day. But I digress, because the principal is a wtf for another day.
The final straw came when the grade 11 Chemistry teachers went online to the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) website-- the government run standards commission that deals with 'cautionary labelling of containers of WHMIS controlled products, the provision of material safety data sheets (MSDSs) and worker education and training programs" (ie: Warning, this material is hazardous. It contains X, Y, Z. Here is what can go wrong. Here are the exact steps to take in case of an accident with this material). Instead of getting the information and datasheets that are mandated to be part of the cirriculum, they were instead treated to a Bessy page shooing them away from "Dangerous Knowledge".
Yup. The information that is government-mandated to be taught in order to ensure that every student can recognize and handle these materials safely is dangerous knowledge. The same was true for any other website they tried to go to that contained such dangerous keywords like "chemical", "explosive", and "hydrogeon".
My fiance was finally fed up. She literally couldn't do her job because Bessy had determined that it was too dangerous to access saftey information. Her solution? She went to a group of her students and said "I know you've already figured out how to get around Bessy. Set me up."
After being pointed to Script Monkey, SwitchProxy, Tor, Vidallia and a list of usable proxies-- and of course good old Google Translate, the department was back in business. Bessy still sits on her porch, rocking absently and cackling to herself, but now the teachers, like the kids, just don't come around to see her anymore.