How to Access Blocked Websites, Unblock Restricted Sites
How to access blocked websites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo at school or office?
This article suggests workarounds to help you unblock access to restricted websites at universities, school and offices.
Background: 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 swimming or bathing suits. In China, websites that talk about sex, Tibet or Democracy are blocked.
Social sites that are often blocked include Google News, Typepad, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, last.fm, etc.
There are always legitimate reasons to bypass the internet filters and unblock websites. The following tricks will show how to access all websites at school, college, offices or at home.
1: To access blocked website, type the IP number instead of the URL in the browser address bar. However, if your blocking software maps the IP address to the web server (reverse DNS lookup), the website will still remain blocked.
2: Use a URL redirection service like tinyurl.com or snipurl.com. These domain forwarding 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
3: 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
4: 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.
5: There are anonymizer websites who will fetch the blocked web page from their servers and display them to you. As far as the service provider is concerned, you are viewing the page on the Anonymizer website and not the blocked site.
6: You can access blocked or restricted websites by using Yahoo Babelfish or Google Translate language tools as a proxy server.
You just have to invoke the Google translate service with the same language pair like English to English. Assuming that Google is accessible in your school, you should be able to access any website with this method - Babelfish Proxy Sever
Unblock restricted websites that require login
7: Anonymous Surfing - Browse the internet via free 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 any proxy server with your Web browser and enter a URL or the address of the blocked website.
This article suggests workarounds to help you unblock access to restricted websites at universities, school and offices.
Background: 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 swimming or bathing suits. In China, websites that talk about sex, Tibet or Democracy are blocked.
Social sites that are often blocked include Google News, Typepad, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, last.fm, etc.
There are always legitimate reasons to bypass the internet filters and unblock websites. The following tricks will show how to access all websites at school, college, offices or at home.
1: To access blocked website, type the IP number instead of the URL in the browser address bar. However, if your blocking software maps the IP address to the web server (reverse DNS lookup), the website will still remain blocked.
2: Use a URL redirection service like tinyurl.com or snipurl.com. These domain forwarding 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
3: 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
4: 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.
5: There are anonymizer websites who will fetch the blocked web page from their servers and display them to you. As far as the service provider is concerned, you are viewing the page on the Anonymizer website and not the blocked site.
6: You can access blocked or restricted websites by using Yahoo Babelfish or Google Translate language tools as a proxy server.
You just have to invoke the Google translate service with the same language pair like English to English. Assuming that Google is accessible in your school, you should be able to access any website with this method - Babelfish Proxy Sever
Unblock restricted websites that require login
7: Anonymous Surfing - Browse the internet via free 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 any proxy server with your Web browser and enter a URL or the address of the blocked website.
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Reader Comments:
Nice post but I would like to add some China Related info.
As far as I notice (from Shanghai) there a several layers of filtering happening.
Blogs hosted on blogger can be accessed using Anonymyzer for instance but the BBC cannot.
Typepad seems to be available again. One reason could be, but this is guessing this is because they moved to a different data centre and might have changed their IP\\\'s
Approach 1 - As mentioned it works for many sites but not for all. Depends on how strict the Gov has set the filter for certain instances.
Approach 2 - IP numbers haven\\\'t helped me out so far. Most blocking is as far as I have noticed actually based on IP. Whole sets of websites virtually hosted by Yahoo are blocked for example. All on the IP-(range)
Approach 3 - Tinyurl and the like don\\\'t sort any effect. I just tested this.
Approach 4 - Works for Blogspot blogs not for BCC (based on a limited test)
Approach 5 - Google cache doesn\\\'t work in China, Shanghai
Approach 6 - Can\\\'t seem to get the last option \\\"The English to English translation\\\" to work.
The best way forward is actually either pay for a proxy service or set up your own proxy on a server somewhere outside of China to guarantee full access to whatever website you fancy.
By the way, I had to use a proxy to read this post.:)
An additional way to get around the filter regarding blogspot blogs is using rss readers like bloglines.
as another aside, unfortunately DMOZ is also blocked in China so that won\'t help the average surfer.
Im in BC Canada and none of those work with the Government block here. In fact they even block proxy server sites.
I have been looking for different ways to gain access to myspace in school as it is blocked here. This article has definitely helped me unblock myspace in my school.
Thanks. But will it work in Pakistan, China or Iran where Technorati and Blogspot are banned and blocked by government ?
This is a lesser known trick, but some less sophisticated filtering systems have trouble when the URL hostname/ip is converted to decimal. Do a google search for 'convert IP to decimal'. Google.com turns into http://1113982867.
- Eric B
http://eric-blue.com
Ok so i work for the government and they are hard to do beacuse they block everything but i did it ! You have to look up a anonymouse sigh on google or something then go to google translate and typr in that anonymouse address, you then translate to get to the anonymouse sight then use that to get to myspace ect....
Sean
I just used the cached google page in order to read this post , then switched to http://feeds.feedburner.com/labnol.BUt the question here is, why can I read only the last few posts on this? What if I wanted to read your post in the first week of July: "Search Engine Index Sizes: Google vs Yahoo vs MSN".
[This I was able to locate using Google search of course but:P in the cached version I cant see the images, hence, this post becomes less informative in that case.Any ideas?]
Now that blogspot is banned, atleast for the moment, what if a web searcher like me wants to view the information posted by you gzillion years ago(or a day or two ago) ?
Thanks,
Monica
Perhaps TOR, or a derivative such as TORPark (TOR combined with portable Firefox) or the Vidalia project (TOR made easy) could help? I don't really know if the protocol used by TOR is blockable, but it's worth a shot I would think.
If you're unfamiliar with TOR, it's basically a sort of software router system that encrypts everything sent over it and pipes all communiques through at least three other TOR routers before the request reaches its destination (and thus obscuring the true source of the request). It really was meant for anonymous surfing, but if the protocol's not blockable (I have no idea if it is) then it should serve to get around filters as well. The extra transmission steps (never mind the high load rate on the relatively small TOR network - they need more server volunteers) can really things down to dial-up speeds (and if you're using a modem now, then I presume it's like degrading your 56kbps modem down to something like 9600 baud), but it can be worth it.
TOR (The Onion Router - each midpoint router your requests hit are like peeling away a layer of skin on an onion, get it?) is actually noticably faster nowadays -- I'm actually using it right now. They've gotten more people involved, I guess, because there are definitely times when the slowdown is almost completely unnoticable. Most other times it's pretty reasonable. TORPark on a USB drive is definitely a great thing to carry around with you...
Just use Bypass Proxy to access all the blocked sites like MySpace.com or Facebook or even Orkut in your home, work or even at college.
Noticed something while reading your blog. The google ads on your page showed proxy websites ready to allow access to blocked pages. So it is a good idea to try them out.
I personally do not know if they will work or not as i am on an unblocked PC.
torpark doesn't work if you are using proxy server for accessing net. not working for me. tried various anonymous sites but still orkut is not accessible. any body who can help
Im in Beijing and read this site without need for a proxy server. Using the cached page doesnt work here. Some info can be found if you mis-spell the english - eg tianenmen square instead of tiananmen
if the blogger is blocked the type the ./ infront of the blocked address then it seems to work for sumsort of restrictions.
http://blogger.com./
regards to allll
Bebo is blocked in my school can you help???
Is there some sort of Internet Explorer Emulator out there that can be used to search websites... kinda like you stay in the one website while a java program or whatever goes to different sites. or is that impossible?
This website has been working at my school for almost a year now so it should work for some of you folks!
Hi all, I am from UAE and here all the web proxies that are mentioned here have been blocked by the ISP. Can anyone kindly give their experiences of finding a way out??
Many thanks in advance
umm i have used all ur advice and still cant get on myspace from my school what else should i do?
I don't suppose anyone knows how to get around the blocking of proxy sites?! You see, the one I was using is now blocked, and a search for alternative proxy sites revealed them as blocked also, from proxy servers to lists of proxy sites..what am I to do?.
Sometimes for some sites, using HTTPS instead of HTTP works because only the HTTP link is blocked not the HTTPS.
For example in my office k9 is used to block sites, so some of the sites like mail can be open this way.
One time when I was at a hotel they had myspace blocked on all the computers. This guy told me a web adress kinda like google where you just type the website name and it takes you to it even if its blocked but now I dont remember the name of the website. It was something really random. Does any one have any idea what it could be?
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