How to disable Cyber Patrol

These instructions will not work with Cyber Patrol for the Macintosh, or with the proxy server version of Cyber Patrol. To make sure your computer has Cyber Patrol installed on it, see our page about how to determine which blocking software is installed on your computer.

(To disable Cyber Patrol for the Macintosh, click here. Otherwise, to disable Cyber Patrol for Windows, keep reading.)

These methods look longer than they really are,
because we go into a lot of detail to help beginners.
If you're an intermediate Windows user, these methods
should be very easy to read through.

Method 1

Has been tested to work with all versions of Cyber Patrol up to version 4.04.004, which was the version available from Cyber Patrol's Web site as of 6/14/2000.

Download "cURL" (125 K) from this site or from the original author's site at http://curl.haxx.se/. cURL is a DOS program that can fetch Web pages for you and save them to a file on your computer, without being blocked by Cyber Patrol. (That's not what the author wrote it for, but it turns out that Cyber Patrol simply doesn't block Internet programs that run from DOS. This method will not work with other blocking programs such as SurfWatch.)

After you've downloaded cURL, you can open a DOS prompt (just double-clicking on the curl.exe file won't work), use the DOS prompt to go to the directory where you saved the curl.exe file, and type, for example:

curl http://www.peacefire.org -o output.html
This will copy the contents of the page "http://www.peacefire.org" to the file "output.html", and you can then double-click on output.html to view it in your Web browser. cURL can also download images; for example, by typing
curl http://www.peacefire.org/graphics/pf.logo.big.gif -o logo.gif
you can download the Peacefire logo. The main inconvenience of this method is that it can only download files from the Web one at a time, so if you open the output.html file and you want to click on a link, you have to figure out where the link points to, and then run "curl" again to download the page at that location.

Method 2

Has been tested to work with all versions of Cyber Patrol up to version 4.04.004, which was the version available from Cyber Patrol's Web site as of 6/14/2000.

  1. Download the Internet JunkBuster proxy, ijb20.zip (203 K), either from this site or from the author's site at http://www.junkbuster.com.
  2. Restart Windows. (This is not necessary if you haven't tried to access the blocked site since the last time you started Windows. However, if you just tried to access a site that was blocked, Cyber Patrol keeps a "memory" of what sites you have been denied access to, so you need to restart Windows to clear Cyber Patrol's "memory".)
  3. Make sure you are disconnected from the Internet.
  4. Set your browser to use "localhost port 8000" as a proxy server. (For Internet Explorer users, you must set this proxy setting in both dial-up settings and LAN settings.) You can change your browser's proxy settings as follows:
  5. Unzip the ijb20.zip file and double-click junkbstr.exe to run it. You should see a DOS box with the message:
    The Internet Junkbuster Proxy(TM) is running and ready to serve!
  6. Still without being dialed in to the Internet, try to access a blocked site e.g. http://www.peacefire.org/. Within the Web browser, you should get an error message from the Internet Junkbuster proxy saying "Host not found: www.peacefire.org".
  7. Now dial in to the Internet.
  8. Hit reload to try going to "http://www.peacefire.org/" again, and this time you should get right through.

This method only works on one site at a time. Once you get through to http://www.peacefire.org/, you can browse all the pages on Peacefire.org without getting blocked. But if you want to access another blocked site like http://www.theonion.com/, you will first need to disconnect from the Internet, then try loading http://www.theonion.com/ into your browser (and get the error message from JunkBuster), then dial back into the Internet and re-load http://www.theonion.com/, which should load successfully that time.

If you access a Web site for the first time while dialed in to the Internet, and Cyber Patrol blocks it, then you'll need to restart Windows and go through all of the steps above in order to get through to the site.

Like the author of cURL (see Method 1), the author of JunkBuster did not write it with this purpose in mind, but it happens to work because Cyber Patrol can't block programs that run in a DOS box.

Method 3