When you company blocks some websites, have you been able to get around the blocking?

proxy.org… unless they block that.

And all that is is a list of proxy providers. So, grab a list of candidate sites from your non-work PC and then when at work, try plugging those in to see what works.

There are thousands of proxy sites. New ones added all the time. No way your work can block them all as they come up.

—

Personally, I do not recommend this approach. Use at your own risk. It’s not safe from monitoring. YMMV.

Yes
use a proxy, until it gets blocked, then use another proxy etc
or if you want something thats wicked awesome visit www.torproject.org
use it with firefox and the internet is your playground.
=D

Why would you want to? Does your job mean so little to you that you NEED to go to a website they’ve banned?

Yes. Until we got a head of IT services who took their job seriously and knew what they were doing.

You could use a proxy.

When I worked at the TV station one lady was suspected or goofing off. They started checking her browser history everyday after she left work. It was always empty. She was deleting it before she left everyday.

So they used CRON and a shell script to email her browser history every 30 minutes to the IT guy.

Moral of the story. If someone else has access to your computer you can’t really hide what you are doing.

The easy way for a company to deal with proxies is to instantiate a policy simply stating it’s inappropriate to use a proxy at all on company-owned machines.

Even if you used an https proxy then (and all your traffic was encrypted), they’d still see that you were hitting a proxy site… even if they didn’t determine it to be one until later.

And no, they don’t need to access your browser history to do that. Your computer has to bounce across several company devices to get out to the Internet anyway… and each of those has the ability to log activity and where it came from.

If you have a legitimate business need to hit a blocked site, then I suggest working it thru management and IT. Else do it on your own time from your own machine on your own network.

@robmandu bringin the heat

My theory is that as the economy gets worse this question will no longer require an answer.

back in 2000 when I was in high school I discovered I could get around the blocking program by searching for the web page in another language. I used either French or Italian because those seem to translate the easiest from English, plus some of it you can understand just from intuition. I mean not sure what type of website you are looking up, When I was 14 I mostly wanted to read about computer game reviews and what not so it worked out pretty good. But yeah blocking programs mostly only block english.

I suggest you work harder to do the work your employer expects rather than playing around on his computer.
If you have time to play, use your itouch.

Unfortunately, if you would try to go around the IT Iron Curtain where I work, it’s grounds for termination. Sometimes I bring my laptop in from home and use wifi to look stuff up that I need for work. Our computers log all of the sites we visit, and if you spend too much time online, you hear from “them.” It’s a violation of our ethics agreement.

One thing I have learned is that you should never try to get around a work internet filter. Not only will the IT department be able to see what you’re trying clear as day (and that alone can be enough to get you fired, as robmandu elaborates), but there really is a reason why they choose to use the filter, and while I agree it’s stupid, you should attempt to dismantle the policy or get an exception rather than taking things into your own hands.

I once found my personal website to be blocked by a filter one day. Since I was working on a PHP migration with custom code I built on that domain, I needed to access it to do my work. So I started going up the chain, going through IT then talking to the filter company itself. It turns out it was the server box I was on that was suspicious, and my site was blocked as a side effect. My site was then unblocked (and I moved to a different hosting company that didn’t support sketchy behaviour).

or maybe you have an ignorant IT department that just hates fun
maybe you have a legitmate reason for needing to get around it.

You’re being paid to do a job, not to have “fun”. That’s why it’s called work!
Like I said, if one has a legitimate reason to bypass the filter, then do it the proper way and go up the chain of command. One never has a legitimate reason to endanger your entire network by trying to bypass a filter or other IT rule that one doesn’t agree with. Some people may decide to bypass it by download a program they find on the web that says it’s a portable proxy or whatever, sure enough it causes a breach in your network which is then exploited by those who wrote the tool.

smells like….fear

Nope, smells like “keep your job”.

It costs money but you can also use a tool like mypersonalbrowser.com to create a browser on a remote computer where you can browse more freely. Again, do so at your own risk (of your job) but its an option if you are OK paying. Another thought.

@MrItty and @AlfredaPrufrock I’m right with you. This past March I got the job I’ve been looking for the last three years. (Actually, when you get down to it, I started after this job in 1993, when I graduated with a degree in Education.) With my job I get approved access to CNN.com, Nat Geo, History Channel, MSNBC and all kinds of good stuff for when I have down time. I even have work-related things I can do in down time. Why would I bitch about what I can’t get??

@patg7590 Do you have a job?