Is it worth to VPN?

[Sadly_Not]

My school has a policy against VPNs and proxies...But the filter is very, very strict and useful or otherwise benign websites are blocked. i was wondering if getting a good proxy would be worth it.

Blocked Sites
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Us...AdobeFlash
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles...9/crisis-u
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
The schools filter makes all wikia sites impossible to use
https://www.fanfiction.net/anime/
https://www.fanfiction.net/movie/
https://www.fanfiction.net/game/

many, many more but these um stuck out to me[/Center]

[HSHARK]

Use a Http proxy because a lot of schools likely block all outbound traffic ports except 80 and 443. This makes the VPN unusable

[Sadly_Not]

Is Tor a Http proxy?

[HSHARK]

Tor is sort of like a proxy but it doesn't have a central server. It uses other computers in the network to receive data

[vonunov]

Yes Tor is a more specific thing than a single proxy. It's pretty well known and it would be a fairly high priority for a school network admin to make sure you can't use things like that, but as this post describes, it's not always straightforward to detect this traffic, so it could be worth a try: http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month...rk-Traffic

and http://security.stackexchange.com/questi...or-traffic

Sometimes the protocol of traffic is detected only by the port number. In situations like this, it's easy to bypass protocol blocking by sending other kinds of traffic over an allowed port, such as 443. Also, various kinds of wrappers and tunnels can be used to disguise the traffic. Having a server to SSH tunnel through with the option of using port 443 is often enough for me. However, with inspection at the application layers becoming more popular, and firewalls now checking if the traffic is actually what it appears to be by what port it's using, easy methods like just using a different port are no longer foolproof if they ever were. But other solutions aren't very hard to implement either.

https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/5919/how-to...roduction/

[Sadly_Not]

Ah thanks but I am very stupid and foolish imo. Can you dumb down the instructions..Also it is worth noting that I use a Mac

[vonunov]

That wasn't meant as instructions, just some general information. It'll be hard to know what will and won't work, and what measures will be necessary, before trying anything. Tor could be worth a try, a VPN could be worth a try, and they might not need any special extra steps to work. I think a VPN is a good thing for anyone to have and a lot more versatile than Tor, so I'd recommend trying that if you have access to one, or else play around with Tor and see where that gets you. Maybe you won't run into any problem at all, but ify you do, then you have something specific to go after.