Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web – Updated
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web - Updated
By Kevin Purdy
The web is a generally free place, but some sites and services want to make it annoying to navigate and enjoy. Stream any video you’d like, see the sites you need, and get at services you thought were down with these tips.
10. Skip Past Annoying User/Pass Requests
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebClosed betas, deleted cookies, and over-eager marketing firms want you to log into just about every site on the net. If you’re just stopping by to read a story or browse around, the time-tested site BugMeNot often has a quickie user/pass combo you can use to log in, along with a Firefox add-on that can do the checking and logging in for you. BugMeNot has gotten a little soft-hearted since its early days, and will sometimes block posting of login details for sites that request it, but is often a handy resource for those who need to wipe their browser or last logged in a long time ago.
9. Read Articles That Rupert Murdoch Wants You Paying For
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebMany news sites have a curious relationship with web traffic, including the Wall Street Journal. They don’t want you stopping by and browsing what’s available, but when they’ve got a scoop to share, they’ll go ahead and open a side door for the masses. You can jump in through that side door at most any time using Google News, which most news sites offer at least one click-through to. The simple way, as Digital Inspiration explains, is to simply copy the URL of any article you’re looking to read at the Journal or elsewhere, and then paste it into Google. The first result should usually get you right where you’re trying to go. Otherwise, head to Google News and enter either a site-specific (site:wsj.com) or source-specific (source:wall_street_journal) operator, then type in your search terms. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.
8. Change User Agents to Get Around Browser Blocks
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebWant a peek at what Gmail on the iPad looks like, or get around sites that pretend Internet Explorer is the only browser that works? You should switch up your user agent, the string of text that a browser identifies itself to sites with. Firefox users can install User Agent Switcher for the easy fix, while Safari has a user agent changer built in. Chrome can change its user agent string, too, and other browsers usually have some kind of work-around available. Next time you hear about coffee shops offering up free Wi-Fi to iPhone users, feel free to take advantage.
7. Get to Gmail When It’s Down
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebWhen bloggers, Twitter addicts, and Gmail fans go nuts over “Gmail being down,” they often mean that the standard web interface isn’t loading in their browser. The Gmail team itself has recommended using an IMAP client when Gmail isn’t loading, and the How-To Geek has quite a few other work-arounds to recommend, including keeping a link to Gmail’s HTML-only and mobile versions handy.
6. Get Actually Usable BitTorrent Speeds
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebThe distributed nature of BitTorrent makes it reliable means to downloading files—unless your broadband internet provider, or your router, doesn’t want to play ball. We’ve detailed the best ways to set up your software, router, and connections in our beginner and intermediate guides to BitTorrent. If it seems like your corporate net provider is the issue, Wired has a guide to outwitting your torrent-stifling ISP. You might not get top-notch speeds with such work-arounds, but you will get downloads that work.
5. Get To Sites Taken Down by Traffic
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebYou’ve just found the coolest new site—unfortunately, so has everybody else on the net. When a site goes down, you can try seeing if Google has a recent cache of that page (by searching for something like cache:lifehacker.com, or try the Coral Content Distribution Network, which has proxies and nameservers and all kinds of geeky network stuff all over the globe, grabbing images of sites on a regular basis. To see what Coral has available, just add .nyud.net to the end of any URL—so lifehacker.com/nyud.net shows what Coral can grab from Lifehacker. It’s a fairly solid bet, especially if a site or page has been around for any length of time, and it beats hitting refresh every five minutes for two hours. But for the full spectrum of page-saving options, the Resurrect Pages Firefox add-on offers both Google and Coral’s cache, along with a handful of other page-saving services, so you can likely get lucky with one of them.
4. Control Computers At Home
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebYour DSL or cable company does not want you serving up a web site or running a game server from your house. That doesn’t mean you can’t get occasionally jump into your home computer to grab some choice music, shut it down, or stream some great video to a hotel room without much on. The basics involve setting up your router for port forwarding, using DynDNS to give your home network a domain name, and, if you want total control, using VNC to remote control your computers. It’s not exactly a plug-and-play job, but once you’re done, you’ll feel like you’ve got one of those secret tunnels back to your home, the kind you turn over a rock and type a code into an embedded keypad to access.
3. Download YouTube and Other Flash Videos
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebEvery company wants to stream video on the web, but few want their viewers to download it—even if the server hit is about the same, and it’s already in the cache, anyways. To get at YouTube and other streaming video sites’ goods, the How-To Geek wrote up a complete guide to ripping and converting Flash videos. Among the recommendations: YouTube Downloader or the Get YouTube Video bookmarklet, along with the old Vixy.net webapp standby. If Hulu’s where you want to grab from, StreamTransport is, at the moment, working for that purpose. For conversion to nearly any format once the download’s done, try the Format Factory.
2. Access Country-Blocked Streaming TV
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebWant to watch Top Gear from Tucson? Hulu from Halifax? Find a good proxy in the country that’s intended to watch the content, set up your browser to use it, and you’re on your way. Commenter hengehog laid out the process of setting up either Firefox or Chrome with proxy add-ons in a step-by-step gallery, so we can all see what the fuss about this new Doctor Who is about. For a more streamlined solution that might not last the test of time, or laywers, try TVGorge.
1. Roll Your Own Proxy to Access Blocked Sites
Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The WebMore professionally maintained proxies (covered elsewhere here) get you your favorite shows. For a lighter, home-rolled solution that gives you occasional access to a more reading-based blog or site, consider making your own proxy. You can set one up on the same space you maintain for a personal site with PHProxy. Lacking for server space? No problem—set up a proxy on Google Apps Engine, or run a proxy server from your home computer. Either way, you’ll get good-enough access to sites that work may have blocked, but you occasionally need access to. (Original posts: PHProxy, Google App Engine).
What’s the go-between, work-around tool you use every day, at work or home? What little tricks or software have helped you work past artificial walls? We want to hear all about your clever means in the comments.
Honorable Mentions:
1. Using IP Instead of URL
This depends on the software/application used. Sometimes blocked sites are stored as a list of URLs (eg. www.yahoo.com, www.donwload.com,etc) and typing the IP instead of the URL might sometimes work. In a local computer, doing a ping domain.com command in Command Prompt (Mac users use Terminal) will return you the IP address. You can also do it online via www.whatsmyip.org
2. Redirection with Short URL service
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.
Here’s 2 Short URL service we’ve previously mentioned – MooURL, SnipURL
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.
4. 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.
5. Anonymous Surfing
Some site allows you to take advantage of their proxy or domain to surf other sites as anonymous. Here’s 90+ proxy websites we’ve previously mentioned.
6. 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.
Go to Tools -> Internet Options. Select Connections tab. Click into LAN Settings, check Proxy Server. Insert your proxy URL inside Address.
7. Bypass with Translations services
Online translation services like AltaVista BabelFish, Google Translate 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), retranslate it even if you don’t need to and let Google or AltaVista fetch you the content.
8. 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
9. 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.
-
Top 100 Tools and Resources for YouTube [/caption] YouTube is still the undisputed king of video sharing on the web, so it only makes sense that there... -
Censorship: First, China. Next: Australia? [/caption] By MARINA KAMENEV / SYDNEY TIME The concept of government-backed web censorship is usually associated with nations where human... -
How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months [/caption] By: the Blog Tyrant In my first year of University I sold a blog for $20,000 USD after only... -
Top 30 best free iPhone apps [/caption] There are now well over 200,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and, surprisingly, many of the... -
Top 10 Smartphone Advances of 2009 By Marin Perez As smartphones further cemented their place in the enterprise, Apple, Motorola, Google Android, and RIM Blackberry vied...
-
Corporate Blogging Issues and Concerns If you have never blogged before and are interested in starting a corporate blog, there are a few issues and... -
SEO: Tricks With Reference To Getting A Joomla Site On Google Page One There are several mechanisms to receiving the number one ranking from Google’s algorithms. At last count, the number of variables... - Top 7 Fundamentals For Google Optimization! Google SEO Tips And Techniques By Expert! Who doesn’t want to get Top Ranking Positions in Google? 1st Page Placement in Google is NOT difficult, you need...
- Top Tested Ways How To Make Money From Home Here are some tested ways to make 1000 dollars from home online, these ways are indeed tested and work every...
- Learn How To Get Free Visitors To Your Web Site. Free visitors is what every webmaster wants. Though there is no free traffic as such. Under free traffic we usually...
