You may find helpless when your school, college or office block their students/workers from accessing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, Friendster, Bebo, Hi5 etc.I will here describe few ways so that you can bypass the restrictions and surf the web like normal.
But before starting the article please be careful, We will not held any responsibility if you’ve breach the regulations of any organizations. If it is blocked, it means that you are not supposed to access the Website.
One of the most widely used methods to access blocked websites is to use Proxies or Anonymizer websites. But use of proxies are not easy and most of the time only the network admins will have access to it, and almost all the anonymizer sites gets blocked by firewall as well. So what is the way out to access blocked websites?
15 ways to show How to Access Blocked Sites
- Online translation services: Online translation services like Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/), AltaVista, Yahoo BabelFish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/), SDL FreeTranslation, Tolingo etc allows you to translate a website from one language to another and display the translated results on their own page. English to Hindi translation shows below for your reference in Google Translate.
- Using IP Instead of URL : Sometimes blocked sites are stored as a list of URLs (eg. www.cnet.com, www.google.com etc) and if you type IP address in place of the URL, it might works. In Command Prompt type “ping domain.com”, (here domain .com is url of your desired sites) shows you IP of that URL. Mac users use Terminal in place of Comand Prompt. It will return you the IP address. You can also find IP online at “www.whatsmyip.org”
- Screen-Resolution.com: Screen Resolution Checker shows us, how a website looks in different resolutions. It works only on Internet Explorer, but it is good option to access blocked sites. You can click on the internal links and navigate through the website.
- Proxy Bypass Software : Proxy Servers or Proxy software utilities can easily bypass your server to access blocked websites and you can run your desired website (like Ultra surf, Hide My Ass, Web Proxy, Orkut.pk, Proxify, Rocketsurf, BackFox, you can search these tools on Google easily). They can protect your privacy by helps you to surf anonymously and securely. Proxy Servers help to prevent monitoring on your network by encrypted connections, so it is not any easy task to traced back to you.
- BrowserShots.org : Browser Shots (http://www.browsershots.org/) gives the static snapshots of the website URL you requested, It doesn’t support navigation through the website. but It can be useful to access those blocked websites which doesn’t need you to login to access the content. It is better to register with the service so that you can browse all the features of this website.
- Short URL service Redirection : Sometimes the URL you intend to browse might be ban, but converting them to another a shorter URL with short URL services might just help you to bypass the settings. (Like MooURL, SnipURL, bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd)
- Google Search Cache: Search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo shows cache webpages link and these cached pages are stored in search engines themselves Click on the ‘cache’ will bring you to a cache version of the page, as updated as how search engine caches it. But in many cases many admins blocking the URL of Google cache itself, in that case try bing,yahoo or other search engines.
- Google Mobile Search: Use Google Mobile Search is a good option to view blocked pages. Google display the normal HTML pages as if you are viewing them on a mobile phone. Google removes the javascript content and CSS scripts during the translation, and breaks a longer page into several smaller pages. You just have to type www.google.com/gwt/n?u=yoursite.com, now replace yoursite.com to your desired web page URL and it will display that page in mobile format.
- Anonymizer : You can access a third party site which in turn routes your request to the required server. Some services provide URL encryption also. The problem is that most of these servers are no longer free.
- Retrieve web pages via Email : WebinMail or Web2Mail are free services that sends your requested websites you want to read right into your inbox. You have to enter the URL address of the web page you want to receive in the subject of your message, then you will receive a reply mail within few minutes. For example an email with the subject “news.bbc.co.uk” would request the BBC news and you should receive a reply mail within 5 minutes. For WebinMail you have to write you desired URL in subject and mail it to browse@webinmail.com, in case of Web2Mail send an email to www@web2mail.com with the address of the web page in the subject.
- RSS Feed : If the site you intended to visit provides RSS feeds, you can subscribe and read it with a RSS reader, or have it regularly send the contents to your email. Most websites support RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to their RSS Feeds in a feed reader or by email. This enables you to read website content without accessing the actual website in order to view the content (updates, new articles, etc.). Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsBlur, Feedingo, FeedMyInbox, FeedBlitz are some of the examples here.
- Internet Archive – Wayback Machine: Wayback Machine is a internet service that periodically keeps a copy of almost all websites in the Internet way from the date they’re started. Clicking on the latest copy of what Wayback Machine have should be somewhat similar to the real site. Another way to access blocked sites via caches. Not helpful always.
- Web to PDF : You can use any URL to PDF convert service (http://pdfmyurl.com/), It can fetch your requested URL and convert it to PDF document. You can download it on your computer and read it by any PDF Reader.
- Anonymous Surfing : Some site allows you to surf other sites as anonymous. You can search these sites on google or yahoo and use them.
- Use Proxy in Browsers : There are tons of sites out there that distributes free proxies of almost any country. Here’s an example. Check out the following methods on how/where to insert proxies in your web browsers.(i) Proxy Surfing – FirefoxUnder Advanced tab, select Network tab, then click inside Connection Settings. Select Manual proxy configuration, put proxy under HTTP proxy.(ii) Proxy Surfing – Internet ExplorerGo to Tools -> Internet Options. Select Connections tab. Click into LAN Settings, check Proxy Server. Insert your proxy URL inside Address.