Problems with Content Filters and Site Blockers

Many companies, organisations and ISP's are implementing content filtering of some form of another these days, often blocking perfectly litigate sites.

In my opinion there is never an excuse for blocking access to sites at a public level. There can in cases be reason to do it in a work environment, for example, when the need to check Facebook updates is overruling the need to work but there is never an excuse to block access to sites at a ISP level, e.g. preventing access completely.

Even so, there is sometimes sites that are block for no good reason. For example I used to frequent a forum that had a section discussing but not linking to torrents which was blocked. In cases like these we can sometimes need a way to bypass these filters.

There are many ways to do this, for example, VPN's, and although that may be one of the best methods it's not necessarily possible as they are often expensive and sometimes you just don't have enough access to the system your using to install them.

If you do have the ability to install a VPN on your machine I can recommend HotSpot Shield to be a good free one. It does embed ads into the pages you view but these can be closed and it is free with (almost) full connection speed.

The easiest method I've discovered, which although may not be perfect, does the trick is to use Google Translate. Simply enter the URL of the site you want to visit in the translate box and, presuming it's an English site, set the From language to Russian and To language to English. This will ensure you don't get an error regarding Already In English.

If you need to download something from the site in question, like in the case of a well known Pirate Ship logo'd site, if the site uses subdomains for the downloads, for example downloading.example.com/download.exe you can often just paste this straight into the browser as in a lot of cases, although the protection blocks the main site it doesn't recognise subdomains.

Lastly and this is by far the easiest method, although also the most unreliable as it doesn't always works, it to just use the sites IP address. Because IP address change so often, some computer level blockers such as those in use at a office only block based on domain names so enter the IP will allow access.

For example, say www.google.com is blocked, you can just as easily access it via http://173.194.34.99 (Note: also good address for testing if your internet is broken or ISP is having an issue with their DNS). In order to get a sites IP, (this would need done in advance) on Windows, go to Start > Run > cmd and then type ping google.com the IP address that appears in the reply format is the sites IP. The same system works for Mac OSX and Linux , although on those systems it will ping indefinitely and you will have to press Control + C in order to stop the ping.