As of November 1, 1995, direct access to foreign World Wide Web servers has been blocked to all universities in Israel. As of December 15, 2003, direct access to all Israeli web servers has also been blocked. This means that in order to access documents on a server not at Weizmann, you must configure your Web browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Lynx) so that it uses a caching proxy server. If you are using Mac OS X, you must configure the proxy outside of the Web browser.
A caching proxy server is a computer dedicated to handling Web accesses, and storing copies of requested documents on its disk cache. The first time a user requests a document, the proxy server accesses it from the distant server where it sits, makes a copy of it in the local cache, and then sends a copy to the user. The next time any user requests that same document, it is served directly from the local cache.
You may configure your browser to use the Weizmann proxy only if you are working on a machine that is on the Weizmann network or if you have authenticated yourself to the firewall. (See the note on the http8080 service).