How to Unblock Websites at School, Work And Home

If you use computers in a corporate workplace, libraries, or educational institutions, you have probably run into the problem of the institutional IT department blocking certain websites and making it impossible to access resources that you may need or want. It’s not just the obvious blocked sites that we’re talking about here (sites with recipes for chicken soup, of course – what were YOU thinking of?), it’s social media sites like Facebook, video resource sites like YouTube, and so on.

It’s useful to have the ability to bypass these restrictions when you need to. One technique is to know the methods used to block a website and to block a website on Mac and then simply reverse the process in order to unlock a site. However, many times (in fact, usually) in an institutional setting you will lack access to the resources needed to unblock a website manually. In this article, I will show you how to gain access to blocked sites using tools that you can generally have access to even on a locked-down network.

(Want to save time and just unblock YouTube so you can get your cat video fix for the day? Check this out: How to unblock Youtube at school and at home,)

Which Websites Are Most Commonly Blocked?

There are a lot of sites that you might want to visit but that The Man is oppressing you by locking down. Besides Facebook, other blocked websites that you want to unlock may include Instagram, Google News, Twitter, Flickr, Hulu, LinkedIn, Ebay, Reddit, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.

Proxy Websites

The most straightforward method of gaining access to a blocked site is to use a proxy website. Proxy sites (also known as anonymizers) are handy websites that present an innocent front to the world. However, when you visit the proxy site you can enter any URL in the proxy interface, and the site will load the desired web page(s) for you and display them on your browser, without the blocking software on your network ever being the wiser. There are many anonymizers available online. Two popular free ones are Anonymouse and KProxy, but there are always anonymizers coming and going. In addition, over time sophisticated IT departments have begun adding the proxy sites to their ban lists, creating a kind of arms race; a server that works today might not work tomorrow. Fortunately, there are always new ones. We maintain a list at the Top 50 Free Proxy Server Websites as well as Best Free Proxy Sites.

Accessing Unblocked Search Engines at School

You will need to have multiple techniques and approaches to unblock web sites in school or at work. As with proxy servers, there is an ongoing arms race between the people who want to shut down access to information online, and those who want information to be free. Here is a collection of techniques that you can use to try to gain access.

Use IP Address Instead of URL in Browser

One method of evading a relatively simple blocking system is to use the IP address of a website rather than its text URL. You can type the IP address into your web browser and it will take you to the site with that IP address. You can find the numeric IP address of a given URL using this tool. For example, typing “www.techjunkie.com” and “104.25.28.105” into your browser would take you to the TechJunkie website – except that TechJunkie is configured to reject direct IP addressing for security reasons.

Use TOR

TOR, also known as The Onion Router, is a free software that protects the privacy and security of its users. The way that TOR works is that it relays your IP address through several different points across the world to prevent the original data from being recognized. The main drawback to TOR is that it’s slow since it does go through multiple sources to get to the website. You can install TOR on a flash drive and gain access to the Internet (including the Deep Web). This is a fairly big topic, and we have a whole article about using TOR to navigate the Deep Web.