Many IT departments in schools and offices invest a lot of money and manpower on firewall software, internet security and web filtering. Many popular websites and proxy websites are being blocked and cannot be accessed from computers in these schools and offices thanks to the internet filter software. These restrictions are usually placed not to protect the internal network from threats like spamware and malware, but to disallow users from surfing unrelated websites and undermine productivity. For example, almost everyone has heard about the company manager that was sacked because it is found that he spent many hours in the office surfing naughty internet sites instead of doing his work.
However, school students and company works can still easily get to blocked sites and bypass web filters for internet though free web proxy sites. Although network administrators try hard to block access to these proxies as well, many new online proxy web sites are created every day around the world. It has become a cat and mouse game - everyday, students search for freshly created internet proxies to surf Myspace, Youtube etc for school bypass while network administrators monitor the web traffic daily to detect and block these free proxy web servers used to gain unauthorized access to restricted and blocked websites.
The most popular destinations for internet proxy users are social websites such as MySpace, Facebook, or Youtube. We are get bored and have a mind block every now and then during school and office hours. That is perfectly understandable. However, these social sites are highly addictive and they can indeed waste time meant for schoolwork and company productivity. The additional costs paying for bandwidth and computer resources in order to surf these social sites can be very high.
If your work place or school has installed web filters such as WebSense or Net Nanny to block access to your favorite websites, an unblocked anonymous proxy server can act as the "middle man". You first visit such free proxy websites to test if they are blocked in the first place. Clear access? Good, the next step is to find a little address field on the site for you to enter the URL of your destination site. Sometimes, the free proxy webmasters make it a little difficult for you to find the address bar. If you can find it after spending more time than necessary, that means many others did not bother to try finding and that proxy website might just be underloaded and transfer web pages faster for you. Most free web proxy servers will bombard you with lots of popups, popunders or interstitial advertisements. You just have to bear with it, since they provide the service to you for free, they must make some pennies from these various forms of online advertising. If you do not like such distracting advertisements, you can pay for exclusive access proxy servers. They cost about $10 a month and can be a lot faster compared to the free public proxies. There are only about one person willing to pay for proxy access out of every 1000 proxy users, so you can imagine the server performance difference when you go the freebie way. Of course, there is the danger of your network administrator blocking that paid proxy right after you have paid up. Normally, these paid web proxies are not easily detected and they offer secure SSL web browsing protection. If you are worried, ask upfront for any money back guarantees before buying in. They are typically used by web surfers trying to protect their online anonymity rather than using it for accessing blocked websites. But you can try since you never know right? $10 a month is quite cheap compared to the time wasted on searching for free new proxy websites and waiting for your web pages to load on these busy public servers.
You may need to try several free public proxy websites before finding one that is unblocked by your office internet filter, work correctly with your intended destination site, fast enough and does not irritate the hell out of you by showing you all sorts of popups. Some even show above twenty one and naughty advertisements which can spell trouble for you if someone else walk pass behind you and saw a pair of curvy round meat on your computer screen. There are now sophisticated content filters being used that can automatically detect and label a website as being malware, naughty and proxy. These use the website's domain name and the html or javascript content on the web pages. For example, if the domain name contains both myspace and proxy, there is 99% chance that it is a proxy and should be blocked. There are no legit and reputable websites that have both terms in their names, and hence there is no risk of accidentally blocking an important website that is used for work or study purposes. If the domain name sounds very innocent and does not contain high alert terms such as "proxy", "unblock", "bypass" etc, the web filtering software can still check for proxy footprints within the html contents. There are very few websites other than proxies that contain buttons saying "Surf!", "Unblock" etc. The automatic blocking can also be based on the IP addresses of the proxy servers. There are some well known and large proxy hosting companies around that supports nearly 90% of all the online proxies you can find on the internet today. The IP addresses of these companies are publicly known and hence they can be added to the blacklist of web filter software. You may wonder what happens to a normal website that happens to be hosted on those IP addresses. The sad news is, small websites are deemed as not so important compared to large established ones. You will not expect the large Yahoo or Wikipedia to share an IP with a proxy, that is not possible so they do not have to worry about it. So what if a small site gets blocked by mistake, whatever little content it has, Wikipedia should have as well if not more. Thats the rationale and argument behind the use of IP blocking. Furthermore, its the webmaster's fault for hosting an ordinary website with a proxy hosting company in the first place. Weird, but its happens very often because some webmasters own both non-proxy and proxy websites.
You need to also be careful about browsing websites that require account logins when using a online proxy server. You are giving away your login details such as your login ID and password and the proxy owner can program the proxy server to record down such details and use them to access your accounts. If you have your other private information such as social security number, credit card details, home address, personal pictures on that website account, you are indirectly giving out these very personal and private information. Do you have any idea what can happen when these falls into the hands of the wrong people?
At the end of the day, you have to think whether all these troubles are really worth it or not. You know you are not allowed to visit a particular site during school and office hours when you find it blocked. Going all out to bypass internet filters in order to regain access is considered a breach of rules. Choosing to surf the web freely without proper authorization can mean getting suspension, loosing complete internet access rights or even loosing the job. Nowadays, mobile broadband is so cheap and wireless network coverage is quite complete and adequate. Just bring along the notebook to work and classes, then access whatever sites you want from your own computer, own wireless network. The monthly subscription costs nowadays are around $10 to 20 depending on which cities you are in and whether there is a price war between the telecommunication companies at the moment. If you already own a notebook or considering to buy a cheap notebook or an even cheaper netbook like the Asus EEE, then just get a mobile broadband plan from the various competing service providers and be done with free proxy websites. You will no longer encounter website filters on the wireless network you paid for.
