RSS 
So I spend a little over 50 hours a week at my collage. I have 3 classes, and I work as a lab aid for 31 hours a week, plus a few breaks. SSH tunneling has been good to me. It's easy to set up. Most ssh servers I think do it by default (my OpenBSD one did) so there is no set up which is nice for a change. I've been using Putty to do my port forwarding for a year now for my MSN and ICQ because those ports are blocked at school, but ssh isn't ;).
Today some part of our HTTP proxy was malfunctioning and some websites, including mindstab.net were suddenly timing out. I couldn't tell if the proxy was partly busted or if they were going to try some new site blocking (a social networking site was also inaccessible to me). Anyways, I suddenly got the idea to dump all my Firefox traffic through the SOCKS 5 proxy putty sets up to go through the SSH tunnel. It worked like a charm and voila all the Internet is restored to me, but as an added bonus it is unlikely anyone can eavesdrop on me when I'm out and about ;) (just my home's ISP...)
SSH tunneling is awesome.
A quick howto again for it. Write down your home box's IP or get a domain name for it. Launch putty on your client computer and type in the ip/domain name to connect to. In the pane to the left then select Connection->SSH->Tunnels. Then I enter a port of 8080 and select a Dynamic destination and hit the 'add' button. Then connect as normal and once you are logged in your tunnel will be active and ready.
Then go into your Internet application's connection options and tell them to use SOCKS5 proxies on 'localhost' on the port of 8080.
That's it. Then all your traffic will be securely tunneled to your home computer and go out safely to the internet from there, unimpeded and unmolested by the systems admins of wherever you are at.
