How to surf sites that are blocked by your ISP or a company firewall
Description: This posting will present a number of free options that can provide access and/or allow surfing of sites that are blocked by a corporate firewall or by your Internet Service Provider. Options presented are (1) using a proxy service site, (2) Web2mail (3) getting internet from your home machine via VPN, (4) using an internet anonymizer, and (5) using Google.
Have you ever been in a situation where you where prevented access to certain sites on the internet because you were behind a company firewall or because of a restriction imposed by your Internet Service Provider? If so, you might be able to use the solutions provided below as a workaround.
Although I’ve been asked variants of the question "how do I surf blocked sites from my job" often enough to decide to investigate some potential solutions, let me begin by saying that I present these without experience in a restricted internet situation myself and therefore can not attest to the efficacy of the solutions below.
1- Use a Proxy service site: such as hidemyass.com, can’t bust me, or anonr.com. Many of these sites in fact all belong to the same network and work in the same way: they will act as a go-between between you and the sites you want to access.
The easiest way to find these is to search Google for "proxy service sites" or a similar keyword. Once you are able to access one of these sites you will find an address box where you can enter the URL for the site you want and the proxy site will grab the content for you and present it within the proxy 
site URL, allowing you to surf your desired content while its actual URL is being masked by the proxy site. Note that some of these sites will also provide anonymous internet surfing by disguising your IP address and location info.
Click on the image to the right for a list of some proxy service sites. Bear in mind that your corporate firewall or ISP may have already blacklisted some proxy sites, preventing you from accessing them. In this case you might simply search for some new ones that may have not been blacklisted or considering another solution.
2- Web2Mail: this is a free service that works as follows: send a blank email to send[at]web2mail.co.cc with your desired site URL as the subject. After less than a minute the Web2Mail service will send you an email that contains the web page you requested in HTML format, which you can read in your email client.
As you might imagine, "browsing" your desired site using this service involves receiving the initial email, clicking on a link on that page that most likely be blocked in your browser but that you would use as the subject line in another email to Web2Mail, and repeating. Not the highest quality surfing experience, but will work in a pinch.
One thing I might add: the Web2mail servers are at times unresponsive and there was a point when I was testing it a few days ago and having my emails sent back to me. Since then the issue seems to have been fixed and it is working just fine.
3- Get internet from your home machine via VPN: this stands for Virtual Private Networking. If you are behind a restrictive company firewall you can in most cases set up a connection to your home PC and get unrestricted internet through your home connection. You might want to signal to your network admin that you are doing this; it should not be much of an issue in most settings (you will not need any technical intervention from your network guy to set a VPN up necessarily).
There are many free VPN software options: OpenVPN (and GUI version, pictured above), UltraVNC, TightVNC, LogMeIn Free, and Windows’ own built in VPN. This post is not intended to be a tutorial on how to set this up, but if you search the internet you will find a lot of further information on this. If you know of a good tutorial or tutorials on this please post them in the comments.
4- Use an internet anonymizer: for example, using the TOR onion router. This is a network of interconnected servers that essentially arrives at your intended URL through a surreptitious route of multiple servers, masking your IP address along the way. A good freeware that I previously reviewed that can access the TOR network is Vidalia; other options: Torbutton for Firefox and Operator.
Aside for TOR, another option is JAP, which I which operates more or less under the same principle.
5- Use Google: a very imperfect but quick way to take a peek at blocked sites, as follows:
- View a cached version of your site. Search for the site and/or webpage you seek in Google and, once you have found it in the search results, click on the "Cached" link which will display a cached version that Google has indexed previously. The drawback: in most cases this will be an earlier version of the site that may not up-to-date, depending on how frequently the site content is updated.
- Use Google reader: if your target site has an RSS feed you can sign up for a Google account and use Google reader to grab the RSS feeds from the site. Google reader presents a couple of advantages (1) you can add a subscription to the site using only the site’s URL, and Google will find the appropriate feed URL for you, and (2) in many cases it will display more than the 10 or so posts that are contained in the feed itself (Google probably caches earlier feeds). A potential drawback is if your site publishes partial feeds rather than the post of page in its entirety, inwhich case an RSS reader will be of limited value.
Do you know of other solutions to this problem? Let us know in the comments.
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I have to say that none of these work reliably. UNLESS you pay for a proxy service, only browse static sites, are allowed to install programs that access non standard protocols, and are allowed to vpn out.
Every company I’ve worked with blocks all known proxy sites, anything that isn’t standard internet traffic, google cache, and only grant vpn out access to those that request it.
I think some better solutions are available here:
http://www.internetfreedom.org/
I’m using Freegate and Ultrasurf, fast and easy.
Oh well, I found this useful. I was unable to access my own site from work using anything but remote desktop to my home. The proxy server worked a treat. Thanks
SSH tunnel?
i use notepad to navigate.
Ultrasurf works like a charm every time I’ve used it. I would recommend this to anyone who needs to get around restricted sites.
I use my cell phone as a backup net connection for blocked sites. Most Windows Mobile based phones have an internet connection sharing applet for this purpose. Just make sure you have a good data plan! Otherwise the fees rack up in a hurry.
Also, if you use Ultrasurf and Freegate with Firefox, you can download a wonderful add-on called GProxy, check the installation guide for Firefox 3 on their website also.
Some of the countries using Internet censorship, Finland for example (I am shamed), use simple DNS blacklisting. Easiest way to get thru this is to change from ISP DNS to some other DNS provider like OpenDNS.
Tax payers money well spent…
VNC is not VPN software, it’s a cross platform remote control system, similar to Remote Desktop but can connect to any other OS running the VNC software. IE i’ll use it from home to control the desktops of servers at work if an issue arises and fix it remotely if i can. In most cases you’ll need to establish a VPN connection using either the build in MS one in windows or using CiscoVPN for example.
Very irresponsible post. Great way to get fired.
No such thing as irresponsible knowledge only people who may to choose to use that knowledge in an irresponsible way.
In my previous job there were times I needed information and rather than wait the day or two it takes to go through the normal channels it was quicker and easier to just use a proxy site.
Here’s a novel idea: Trust your employees. At my company (a software company with 125 employees) we have no censorship, no blocking, no internet policy, nothing. (Known virus sites are blocked by the firewall, for obvious reasons). Other than that, we’re not in the business of snooping, assuming everyone is guilty, or treating our employees like little kids. We feel giving them their freedom and a great working environment will give us hardworking and loyal employees in return. And guess what - that’s exactly what it’s done.
Agree with Threepea. Our major (for the UK) TV company used to have a completely unrestricted IT system. In 2004 it took the IT ’support’ department six weeks to realise that the sasser worm was loose, and then they introduced the managed desktop, whose sole purpose seems to be to prevent anyone from getting any work done. I use ‘TeamViewer’ to access my home PC and its applications and data from work; I use the work PC for Lotus Notes only.
Thanks geniuses…firewall restrictions are there to protect the organizations. People get fired over shit like this.
However, websense takes care of you list, even olympicproxy.com.
And thanksto our FW restrictions, we get very few successful spyware/malware connections…and never a BOT net. so UP YOURS!!!!
Hate to disappoint you Andy but bypassing websense using a web based proxy is simple since you only really need to find one not in the banned list. I made my own proxy to bypass Websense in my previous job.
Blocking proxies wont stop you getting malware/spyware and in fact has nothing at all to do with it so why even mention it? Proxies do not install malware, nasty sites do.
Oh and only a couple of months ago there was an exploit in how Windows handled meta image files and a lot of people got infected with bots by some clever sod using this exploit in advertising images hosted on LEGITIMATE sites. How would your wonderful websense/firewall ohelped you then?
God is it me or do most so called IT admins talk total shit in an attempt to justify their inflated pay packet?
anything like freegate or ultrasurf for opera?
As a libertarian, I believe that information should be free, so I thank you for the post.
As an admin, well, I’d like to put you in my shoes for a few weeks.
(I’d also like to force Bill Gates to use his own OS as a punishment, but that’s a different reply entirely.)
[...] How to surf sites that are blocked by your ISP or a company firewall - review - Description: This posting will present a number of free options that can provide access and/or allow surfing of sites that are blocked by a corporate firewall or by your Internet Service Provider. Options presented are (1) using a proxy service site, (2) Web2mail (3) getting internet from your home machine via VPN, (4) using an internet anonymizer, and (5) using Google. [...]
Filter sites via regex .*proxy.* - there’s a ton of them, right there.
If you want to do this without getting caught, don’t do anything stupid or obvious. If your traffic is not encrypted, a decent IDS at the gateway is going to get you busted (this happens at work monthly). If you do anything that uses a lot of bandwidth, this is going to get you busted (this also happens, more rarely).
And of course, if you do this on a computer at work/school/etc where you do not have admin rights you are likely going to get busted (assuming the IT staff isn’t brain dead) when they pick up your crumbs on the machine.
VPN (or tunnels over SSH) and portable apps (portableFF/SSH) are THE best way to go, if you can figure out a good way to make it work. An even better way to go is to tunnel via SSH from within a QEMU (or other virtualized machine) of Damn Small Linux running off a memory stick.
But generally, it’s not worth all the hassle, unless you’re really bored.
I am not sure it will work in blocked situations (I have not tested it for this), but you can try a trick I have been using for surfing with an old slow computer on 33.6k dialup: Use Google’s mobile version of the sites on your desktop.
Google is presenting their own mobile versions of most pages on the internet. They load fast, no scripting on them (much safer), no flash or java applets, you can turn off images, and all links you click on them go to same mobile format type of pages.
The only real problem you may have with them is most forms are broken (you can’t comment on blogs or login to sites), you can’t download binaries (you can peek & see file names inside archives, though), but you can still read the content on the pages, and that’s the important part.
I put a bookmarklet on the sidebar of my blog that will allow you to switch from normal version to Google mobile version quickly & easily, if anyone wants to try it.(just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar and you are good to go)
I also have an input box for you to type in URL’s directly, to visit the sites, if you just want to test it.
I originally put it on my site for owners of old slow computers that can’t handle some sites, and people on dialup that just want things a bit faster. But the more people that it can help and the more useful it can be for other situations, the better.
“Aside for TOR, another option is JAP, which I which operates more or less under the same principle.”
Should have been “which I believe operates more or less…”
Wonder if the Web2Mail would send an exe (application/zipped) file back to my email id. If it did, that would have been great!
@Paparazzi
Not sure if you have an FTP account you can access and download files from (if they are there), but you could try “transloading” the exe you want to the FTP server and then fetching it from there.
This is how WebTV users used to save images, since they had no storage in their TV.
Try this site, if you have FTP access…just enter URL of exe file you want then click the button to Step 2 and enter in the FTP server info. The service will fetch the file & upload it there for you.
http://www.transloader.com
Another trick is to use google’s translation service. You give it the URL of an English page, but tell it to translate from Chinese to English. Anything not in Chinese passes through unchanged.
Hi, to those who are using freegate.. I tried it actually because I find it interesting, and am using it now, which is very effective really.. But I have a problem.. I can’t access my Gmail (Google Mail) accounts and anything that has anything to do with http://mandrakesoft.com (which includes blogger and yahoo messenger)…
Can someone please help me on this? This is really a helpful site for me. Thanks so much!
In defence of the sysops fighting the loosing battle against system infections. “Shithead” was used by one poster!
It is usually us that have to work 72 hrs a week to clean up the mess left by “stupid” users who have fallen victim to drive by infections or worse.
Most of the people posting here appear to be smarter than the average Joe and therefore think it’s your personal right to use your employers equipment, time and resources any way you wish. That may be the case and good luck to you, however it’s the other 99% of stupid users we have to defend ourselves from!
You must try and see the issues from both sides of the fence.
My ISP allows me to open only google.com. So I can google but not open the sites. When I try to open the sites it redirects me to its payment page where I have to put in a scratch card code to keep me online upto the next 12 hours. I would really like to get past this.
If anyone knows of anythting please email me at kijok@butterfly.co.ke.