How To Access Blocked Websites

This article suggests workarounds to help you unblock access to restricted websites at universities, school and offices.

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.

3: 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.

4: 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.
Example: www.hidemyass.com, www. myblack.com, www.120yearoldman.com etc

5: You can access blocked or restricted websites by using Yahoo Babelfish or Google Translate language tools as a proxy server. But you just have to invoke the Google translate service with the language pair like English to Hindi or English to some other languages.

6: Browse the internet via proxy server software. Example: Your freedom, ultrasurf