How To Bypass Blocked Websites At The Office

[Guest Ethan]

How To Bypass Blocked Websites At The Office

Many offices today block websites that may distract their employees, such as YouTube and various social networking services. Although we do not encourage anyone to lose focus while working, censorship is not our good friend. We therefore offer you a couple of tips on how to bypass these filters.

Solution number one: Proxy Services

Most of us know what a proxy is. However, for those of you who don’t, here’s the short story of what a proxy does. While at work, your computer uses an IP address associated with your company’s network. If that company decides to block access to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, there’s not much to do. Or is it? Well, a proxy server helps you log onto the internet through a different set of IP addresses (either from the same country you’re living in or another). Hence, by not using your office’s IP address, you can access any website.

You will find plenty of these services online by simply typing “free proxy services” on any search engine. Furthermore, if you’re using Google Chrome, there are several extensions which will help you circumvent filters – Proxy Switchy, Proxy SwitchySharp, Hide My Ass.

Solution number two: VPN Services:

A Virtual Private Network is somewhat similar to a proxy service. Here you will find plenty of information about what a VPN service is and what it does. Also, our website provided with a handy list of the best VPN providers out there – check it out here.

As far as privacy is concerned, most of these proxy and VPN services guarantee it by not keeping logs of your activity. However, we do advise to check their policies before using them.

Solution number three: Third-Party Websites

If you’re not happy about using proxy websites or VPNs, here’s what we found:

UnblockYouTube is a portal that allows you to access the video service by simply typing in youtube.com in the lower case and press GO. You can even log on to your YouTube account.

FacebookUnblock does exactly the same, but for Facebook, obviously.

A less likely solution is to use the blocked website’s direct IP address. That means, instead of typing in www.youtube.com, you could go to http://www.hostip.info/ and find out the website’s IP address (or just open Command Prompt [if you’re using Windows 7, click the Windows button and type command prompt, then enter] from your Windows OS and ping the respective address). Once you’ve done that, simply type in the numbers instead of the usual address. It may or may not work, but it was worth mentioning.