Many of the schools, colleges and offices block their students/workers from accessing social networking sites like
Twitter, Facebook, Orkut,
Myspace etc. One of the most widely used methods to
access blocked websites is to
use Proxies or
Anonymizer websites. But using proxies is not easy and most of the times 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?
get caught, you might lose your job!
9 Alternative but Innovative Ways to Access Blocked Sites
1. Screen-Resolution.com
Screen Resolution Checker is actually meant to check how a website looks in different resolutions. It works only on Internet Explorer, but surely a cool alternative way to access blocked sites. You can click on the internal links and navigate through the website.
2. BrowserShots.org
Browser Shots is similar to Screen resolution checker, but doesn’t support navigation through the website. It gives the static snapshots of the website URL you request for, but can be useful to access those blocked websites which doesn’t need you to login to access the content. The snapshots given are of very high quality and it would be of the whole page from header to footer.
3. Google Cache
Search engines like Google and Yahoo cache webpages and these cached pages are stored in search engines themselves, which likely will be added to the blocked list. Click on the ‘cache’ will bring you to a cache version of the page, as updated as how Google caches it. I have seen many admins blocking the URL of Google cache itself, in that case try yahoo or other search engines, they must work!
4. Online Translation Services
Online translation services like Yahoo BabelFish, Google Translate etc allows you to translate a website from one language to another and display the translated results on their own page.The trick here is to enter the URL (website you’re blocked), re-translate it even if you don’t need to and let Google or Yahoo fetch you the content! And again, if Yahoo and Google Translate are blocked, you can search for other alternatives!
5. Retrieve web pages via Email
Web2Mail is a free service that sends websites you want to read right into your inbox. All you need to do is send an email to www@web2mail.com with the URL as subject title. You can also try WebinMail
6. Google mobile Cache
Use Google Mobile Search. Google display the normal HTML pages as if you are viewing them on a mobile phone. During the translation, Google removes the javascript content and CSS scripts and breaks a longer page into several smaller pages.
7. Subscribe to RSS Feed
This might not work for all sites, but 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.
8. 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.
9. These methods can still help you to unblock websites. But then, there is no fool-proof way as such since it all depends on how smart your network admin is. So, here I present yet another way to access blocked sites which is based on the method of bypassing URL filtering employed by the admin.
Access Blocked Websites by Bypassing URL Filtering
Most of the network admins in schools and colleges block a website by its name (http://www.xxx.com) or by its IP address. Assuming this is the case, we will learn about a way to bypass the URL filtering.
Step 1: Find out the IP address of the blocked website which you are trying to access. Let us take http://techpp.com as our example. Go to Start –> Run and type cmd
A new window opens. Type ping techpp.com and press Enter. You will see the IP address as shown below.
IP address of techpp.com = 67.222.24.82
Step 2: Convert each of the 4 numbers (67, 222, 24 and 82) into an 8-digit binary value. In order to do this open your Windows calculator, select Scientific view.
Make sure ‘Dec’ is selected and enter the first number and select ‘Bin’. This would give you 8 digit binary value of 67 = 01000011.
Repeat the process for other 3 numbers as well. You will get four 8-digit binary equivalents. Put them all together
01000011110111100001100001010010
Step 3: Convert 01000011110111100001100001010010 into a decimal value. For this, reverse the process explained in Step 2 i.e Select Bin and input 01000011110111100001100001010010 (copy-paste) and then click Dec. This will give you the decimal equivalent of the 32 digit binary number = 1138628690
Step 4: Go to your browser and in the address bar type http://1138628690, this should open http://techpp.com, but it doesn’t, reason given below.
Imp: You might have observed that http://1138628690 is giving Bad Request error. This is because the above trick doesn’t work for websites running on virtual hosts. But other sites like Google, Gmail etc will work flawlessly (http://1249729384 or http://3512041827/)
