I have a problem.  My company has recently (okay, 4-5 months ago)
instated a filter on our web traffic.  Everything in or out gets checked
for "naughtiness" and blocked accordingly.

Apart from the general PITA which is someone else's opinion of the
content of a website (I've had a site containing information about
improving the sustainability of your company blocked as "Occult"
and a site selling optical equipment blocked as "Pornography", while
the unquestionably vulgar website "Tshirthell.com" went through with
no problems), the access times on websites has gone WAY up.

Some days, access to even common and usually fast websites
(Google, Wikipedia, Digikey) slows to a crawl- 30s to 2min for the
page to be accessed.  It isn't a load time issue- the request is hung
in the porno-filter server and, once it goes out, the page load very
quickly.  Fairly often, the load will fail entirely and a 503 error will
result- last Thursday, fully 60% of my page requests resulted in 503
errors.

I have discussed this with my boss, and I know many, many of my
coworkers have discussed it as well.  It seems that HR would rather
have us not working than risk that one of us look at adult content
on work time.

So, background given, I ask the big question:  how do I get around
this?

I have two ideas: first, get a cellular plan that includes data access
and hook my phone to the PC.  Use that for websurfing.  I don't
like this idea because it costs ME money and the web access will
be slower all the time, if more reliable all the time.

Second idea: set up a VPN to my home network.  I figure that will
be faster in the end than cellular, if harder to set up.  The one thing
I DON'T know is whether it will bypass the filtering software.  I'd
think so, because the filter probably just checks http traffic on port
80, but I'm not sure.

Opinions?  Other ideas?  Empathy/sympathy for my situation?

Mike H.
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