How to: Access sites blocked by filters and firewalls

Note: This post will be updated continually, as more methods are discovered and older methods may become useless.

There are millions of websites online. There are over 1 billion net users, that is almost a sixth of the world’s total population. With such huge number of sites come huge abuse of the freedom offered by sites. Abusive sites may include a wide variety of content, which enrages various sections of the society/government/authorities.

Technology has evolved a long way from the traditional Web 1.0 sites with images and tables, and as such, content filtering and monitoring are child’s play. There are many softwares available for use on the client computers themselves, but an even bigger threat for the freedom of net users is country-wide blocking of sites by means of packet filters and firewalls. Countries like China (political sites) and Saudi Arabia (adult sites) are known to block sites extensively.

Offices may also have restrictions on social networking and related sites. Some of the sites blocked in offices may include Facebook, Orkut, ebay, YouTube, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Meebo, Yahoo! Messenger and other instant messengers(IMs). However, no machine is perfect, and there may be cases of unwanted blocking of sites which are needed legitimately.

There are many methods to access blocked or restricted sites, but just keep in mind that the extent to which blocking is done maybe different in different offices/schools/homes, and each of these methods may not work. However, one of these methods is likely to work. The methods of accessing blocked sites is listed in the order of easiest-to-hardest order, so you may want to try out the first method first and so on:

1. Download GhostFox, a privacy-friendly browser which is based on Firefox. GhostFox has a privacy bar just below the URL bar, from which you can select a proxy (select the one from your region), click ‘Apply’ and start browsing(see image below).
   
2. Use anonymous browsing services like proxy servers. These servers fetch pages from the sites that you require, but the filters think that you are using the proxy sites. However, some sys-admins have become wary of such tactics, and may even block out proxies. One such site is Ghost Proxy. However, GhostFox is a better alternative for sites which require logins.
3. Enter the URL of the page in Google search box, and then visit the cached copy of the page. This can be done by clicking the “Cached Page” just beside the green-coloured URL of the page(see image below).
   
4. Some of the older filters and firewalls may have trouble recognizing sites when they are converted to decimal number. Get the IP of the site from Web Server IP Checker and go to RedRoster. Enter the IP in the IP address field and hit calculate. You will get a decimal in the ‘Decimal’ field. Paste it in your browser as http://decimalnumber

Hope you had a good time bypassing filters with these methods – and happy browsing!