Wuntoo has written a detailed comment on how to bypass the internet content filtering software of your school or office using just the calculator application (Start->Run. type calc.exe). This unique Mathematics based trick will probably work when websites are blocked in your institution or corporate network based on the host name or their IP address.
The trick is to convert the human readable website address that's blocked (like bebo.com) into an IP address (208.75.184.160) and again translate this value to a decimal address which is probably not blocked by the website filters.
Here's a step by step guide to render www.myspace.com to a decimal address:
How to Access Restricted Websites
1) get its IP address (216.178.39.74), by pinging the name (if you have a direct internet connection) or if you only have access via a web proxy then find it out by using a networking website like network-tools.com.
2) start your PC's calculator, and change it to scientific mode (using the "View" menu)
3) enter each of the four IP octets, one by one, converting them to binary (enter number and click on the "Bin" radio button)
Thus 216.178.39.74 becomes
216 = 11011000
178 = 10110010
39 = 00100111
74 = 01001010
Notice how any binary numbers less than 8 digits long have had leading zeroes added to pad them out. Reassembled into IP address order, you get 11011000.10110010.00100111.01001010
4) Remove the dots, so you get one huge line of binary, thus: 11011000101100100010011101001010
5) Copy this binary string
6) Go to your scientific calculator, and hit the "Bin" button FIRST (as you are about to enter binary), THEN paste in the binary string.
7) Click on the "Dec" button on your calculator, and you will get the converted value of 3635554122
8) Add the hypertext protocol prefix and paste into your browser's address bar: http://3635554122
Wuntoo adds: I used to be in a place that had websense, where both website names and their corresponding IP addresses were blocked. However was able to get limited access by converting the IP address to decimal, which websense (at the time) did not know about. This might have changed since, or if your school runs an old version it might still work. Note that if you surf away from the page you might hit websense blocks again unless you manually reconstruct the next address you want to get to.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/when-both-domain-name-ip-address-are.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Hi Amit,
The said service/method is not working. Can you please check again??
Written on 8/8/07 4:34 PM
First Thing, it didnt work for me.. Tryd with gmail.com
IP address - 64.233.161.83
Binary form - 100000011101001101000011010011
And final decimal form
- 544526547
tried http://544526547
My understanding is, whenever we do a http://domain or ip
Then this would look up for a Name server for the conversion. And this feature should depend upon if the name server provided by the ISP provides such a feature or not.. Correct me if i am wrong !.
Written on 8/8/07 4:48 PM
Doesnt work me either.
Tried the url in proxify.com too. No luck.
Written on 8/8/07 5:13 PM
Nopes.
My organisation's Websense is smart enough not to differentiate between the two. Just doesn't le me access anything!!
Maybe older versions of it have the vulnerability.
Written on 8/8/07 5:58 PM
This is nice, even I never need to use such a method. Anyway,... you shouldn't give away such knoledge
Written on 9/8/07 2:28 AM
Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)
So am I supposed to be seeing this exclusive, unprotected, fun filled error page???
Most ISPs just smart enough to disable this...
I've tried it on Exattnet, Pacenet... it just fails miserably
Written on 9/8/07 8:06 AM
Here's a spreadsheet layout that computes the number for you.
IP Supernumeral Calculation
Col A Col B Col C
192 16777216 =B3*A3
41 65536 =B4*A4
28 256 =B5*A5
243 1 =B6*A6
=SUM(C3:C6)
Just put the desired IP address vertically into Col A
Written on 9/8/07 10:41 AM
This would have been a crazy hack if it would work flawlessl Amit :( But unfortunately for me (and looks like for a lot of other people) it didn't.
Written on 9/8/07 11:12 AM
A nice trick. But i fear it doesn't work. Not atleast for me. Tried with MySpace and Google. Neither worked.
I think it has to do something with the recognition of the domain name, which it is not able to demystify.
Written on 9/8/07 11:15 AM
I tried for www.orkut.com but after coverting it, the final decimal form that i get takes me to the google search page instead of orkut home page
Written on 9/8/07 11:33 AM
FAILURE!!!
I tried on OPERA. Result - 'You tried to access the address http://909570183/, which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the Web address (URL) is correctly spelled and punctuated, then try reloading the page.'
I tried yahoo.com whose values are:
216.109.112.135
110110001101101111000010000111
909570183
Written on 9/8/07 1:52 PM
This doesn't work for me in firefox.
Written on 9/8/07 4:06 PM
i tried orkut.com for
72.14.209.87
01001000000011101101000101010111
http://1208930647
as rk said it re-directs to google.com maybe since orkut is hosted on google server..
Written on 12/8/07 12:57 PM
a server ip address usually is shared amongst all the websites
hosted on it.
so finding site by ip is not a fool proof method.
Written on 25/8/07 2:49 AM