Access blocked websites at school or work

We suggest workarounds to bypass internet filters and corporate firewalls to help you unblock access to restricted websites at universities or office

Blocking access to undesirable Web sites has been a common government tactic but China, Iran, Saudi Arabia are believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other country in the world.

Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites in Saudi Arabia are about sex, religion, women, health, politics and pop culture. They even block access to websites that sell bathing suits. In China, webites containing sexually explicit content are blocked plus sites on sensitive topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, and dissident activity.

Other popular sites that are often blocked in offices, school and workplaces are Google News, Typepad, Orkut, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, last.fm, etc.

There are however always legitimate reasons to bypass the internet filters and visit the blocked websites. The following methods will help you access blocked websites in school, college, office or at home.

Approach 1: There are websites Anonymizer who fetch the blocked site/ page from their servers and display it to you. As far as the service provider is concerned you are viewing a page from Anonymizer and not the blocked site.

Approach 2: To access the blocked Web site. type the IP number instead of the URL in the address bar. But if the ISP software maps the IP address to the web server (reverse DNS lookup), the website will remain blocked.

Approach 3: Use a URL redirection service like tinyurl.com or snipurl.com. These domain forward services sometimes work as the address in the the url box remain the redirect url and do not change to the banned site.

Access Google Talk Chat or GMail in Office

Approach 4: Use Google Mobile Search. Google display the normal HTML pages as if you are viewing them on a mobile phone. During the translation, Google removes the javascript content and CSS scripts and breaks a longer page into several smaller pages. Google Mobile

Use Mobile browsers as proxy to open restricted websites

Approach 5: Enter the URL in Google or Yahoo search and then visit the cached copy of the page. To retrieve the page more quickly from Google's cache, click "Cached Text Only" while the browser is loading the page from cache.

Approach 6: You can access blocked or restricted websites by using Google language tools service as a proxy server. Basically, you have Google translate your page from English to English (or whatever language you like). Assuming that Google isn’t blacklisted in your country or school, you should be able to access any site with this method. Google Proxy



Approach 7: Anonymous Surfing - Browse the internet via a proxy server. A proxy server (or proxies) is a normal computer that hides the identity of computers on its network from the Internet. Which means that only the address of the proxy server is visible to the world and not of those computers that are using it to browse the Internet. Just visit the proxy server website with your Web browser and enter a URL (website address) in the form provided.