I have just signed up for a course costing £2500, and as part of this course I am entitled to use the college network. I enrolled for this course yesterday and expected to be able to use the network, however when connecting to the network they force you to run a program called Bradford Dissolvable Agent. This basically scans your computer to check that you meet the security policies set by the network administrators. It checks that you have antivirus (most of the anti viruses that is supported are bloatware programs!), it checks that your virus definitions are up to date, it even checks to see if you have anti spyware, and won’t let you on the network if you don’t. In the case of myself I use Avira, however this stupid Bradford program scanned my computer and would not let me on the network as my definitions were not up to date. The crazy thing is it won’t even let you on the network to download the definitions, and when I travel 40 miles to college that is not a joke! If when travelling to college, Avira update their definitions I am stuffed, as this Bradford crap goes online to check in real time. I went to the IT department who were useless and basically told me to install AVG and a ton of bloatware anti spyware so that I can connect to the network with this stupid Bradford crap. I really resent being treated like a baby. I am very careful about what I do online and have never had any problems. In my opinion this Bradford thing is akin to spyware. I have read it scans the registry and can even scan programs that you have on your systems to see if it finds anything blacklisted. If it finds Limewire or something like that it won’t let you on the network. I am forced to run this stupid Bradford program every time I want to log onto the network. It slows things down greatly and is also a system hog. I have even found a facebook group campaigning against this spyware: (just take out underscores) facebook______.com____________ /group.php?gid=121416925858 Now I was thinking how does this program work? From what I have read it scans your system and then leaves a cookie telling the network you can gain access. See this link (just take out underscores) : htt__________p:/______/mailman____________._____lug.org___________.____uk_____________/pipermail/nottingham/2008-October/011794._____________html “A Bradford Dissolvable Agent, or BDA, is a policy compliance test client that a lot of academic networks require users to run on their own equipment before allowing access to the network. It is designed to run then delete itself, leaving behind a cookie (or even a unique hash) that tells the network on connection and DHCP query, that the client system has already run and met the conditions of the BDA compliance test. If that cookie is not present, then the client system is denied access and the user directed to run the BDA again. This is common on LAN situations (moreso on clusters since it'd do no good for an outside machine to access the network and make the whole damn lot fall over - I've had it happen and it ain't pretty, so now I use a BDA on all the nodes), and would be a good policy for a small ISP to use since it locks a client account to a single machine.” Another link, detailing a review of the program seems to indicate it works by MAC address (just take out underscores) : ht_______tp____:_____//w__w____w.secur_____ecomputing.net.au/Rev_______iew/113424,bradford-networks-nac-director-v317.as_____px Does anyone have any idea how I can bypass this Bradford Shit? If it uses a cookie, can’t a fake cookie be made so that the network accepts my connection without running this Bradford crap? How would I go about doing this? I really do refuse to run this crap on my computer, and as such am using my 3g mobile phone connection which is eating my mobile data plan. I think it is really wrong that I pay £2500 to do a course and I can’t use the network unless I am willing to run spyware. In my opinion they should explicitly tell students this before they enrol on courses. So does anyone have any ideas? What about making a fake cookie?
I actually found a rather easy and simple method to bypass the "Bradford Shit". But **** its like 4 years from when this was posted so it would not matter. (for the OP anyways) Im just posting this because some people might happen to have a similar question. ( and currently no answer resides in the internet that i could easily find ) I joined a boarding school in my last year of middle school ( 8th grade ). Currently, i attend 9th grade. My first year at this school, I had to bear the limitations set by this "Bradford Shit" and a period of time when the internet goes out. Solution is VERY and I mean VERY simple. Now im not sure if this fix applies to everyone, but when you attempt to connect to the network, a login page appears. ( which is how the bradford dissolvable agent is downloaded ) DO NOT LOGIN. Instead just go to your network settings and set up a connection to Google's DNS servers. Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/167418/5-ways-to-bypass-internet-censorship-and-filtering/ Worked for me. Hope it works for you too. :pleased:
