How to Access Social Networking Sites when Blocked in Office or School

This is a world where social networking has become the backbone of the way we communicate.  It dominates our behavior online; it shapes our personality in a way we want to present it to others. Social Networking sites also play a significant role as a platform for online advertising. Online advertising uses the Internet in order to deliver marketing messages to prospective customers. Online ads also include ads on blogs, email marketing and of course social network advertising.

Time is what organizations don’t want you to spend there, which resulted in all sorts of firewalls and sites blocking. As they forcefully put restrictions and your access is barred, frustration is eminent. To help to you get over such issues, some methods have been mentioned to help you bypass such blocks and enable public access of your beloved social networking sites!

It is very important to understand the concept of blocking, before we can try to unblock it.  The concept of firewalls and blocks and how do they interact to our network. A lot of different types of firewalls exist and hence we need different kinds of methods to deal with all of them.

The block which is most common in schools and often in colleges too is that they keep a record of the names of all the blocked websites.

The website name is provided to users for easy remembrance and when the website is called, the name is converted to its respective IP address.  Although some of the websites have shared IP addresses but the entire social networking sites you might be using for dedicated addresses hence it is easy to bypass the block. If you are using windows, go to command prompt by going to ‘run’ and typing ‘cmd’. Then type “ping website name –t”. The IP address for the website will be mentioned there. Just note it down and try to open with the IP address. If ‘cmd’ is blocked by the administrator, you can use many online tools to convert web site name to IP address.

The other kind of blocking involves defining a subdomain with embedded blocked sites.  You cannot access the sites just by IP addresses. For that, go to your network connection in control panel. There you’ll find the network adapter through which you are accessing internet. Change the DNS for that adapter.  You can use Open DNS (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) details or Google DNS server (8.8.8.8. or 8.8.4.4). If these DNS are not in use, you should be able to bypass the firewall for some social networking.

For any kind of firewalls, the most recommended way is of using proxy sites. These sites are made that your network will only get the address of the proxy site, while you can redirect to your desired website anonymously.  Its major strength is the popularity of the method incidentally it is also its weakness. Modern systems are able to catch such website and block them. Hence if you are thinking of using, only try the latest ones because old ones would have been blocked.  Internet is filled with such websites so feel free to search and try your luck.

If all of this fails, here are some alternative methods which are all functional, hopefully one of them works for you.

Use of Google Translator: Go to Google translator and give the link of your desired website. Convert it into the language of your preference. And then go to the website. Since now you are accessing it through Google chances are that firewall won’t stop it. This method has some considerate success.

Use of Google caching: It’s a concept where pages are saved and can be accessed again through Google servers. You’ll find the cached option whenever you search. Try your luck; it might be the solution of you.

Wayback Machine: It’s a novel way of accessing old pages. It uses a concept similar to Google Cache but with more focus on specific pages rather than the regular hum drum of Google.

If even these methods are not working and you have encountered a stringent block, accept it and move on to accessing your data rather than the actual website.

User of RSS: check if the website can generate RSS feeds.  Like Facebook does, then you can subscribe to it and read it using readers for RSS. While you will not be able to manipulate data but at least you can access it.

Subscribe to updates on email: We have tried and failed at times, do this the hard way. Whenever there is a notification for you, email notifications are there, through them you can be aware what is happening around you. It’s not the most convenient option, but often the most resourceful.

If you understand the concept behind such methods (read: identify the type of block on your network), try to get creative and bypass it, without causing the organization any trouble!