How to Unblock a Blocked Website Using a Proxy
Dont be surprised if you are unable to open your favorite online forum through your office desktop. Corporate and business offices, educational institutions, public libraries, internet cafes and WiFi hotspots usually have filtered Internet connections to prevent students, employees, customers and patrons from accessing certain websites. Websites that are usually blocked are sites with pornographic contents, or about gambling, entertainment, politics, religion and hacking. Schools have recently blocked as well popular social networks because it is thought that these will distract students from their studies. Some businesses which share this concern have restricted as well their employees from accessing social networks because of concerns about losing office productivity, the risk of virus infection and the downloading of large files that may slow down the system. If you wish to unblock your favorite website, you have to figure out how these were blocked in the first place. To restrict access to online services and websites that are made available in their premises, large computer networks such as schools and corporate workplaces use a specialized proxy called a content filter or a cache extension protocol. A database of URL patterns and their content attributes, which is updated weekly, is provided by the web-filtering company. The web filter is then instructed by the database administrator to ban a wide category of content that are deemed undesirable such as gambling, pornography, social networking and the like. Requests made in the Internet must pass through the web filter and those that match the URL patterns are immediately rejected. Since these are designed to block the website you are going to and not the location you are coming from, the best way to unblock your targeted website is through the use of an anonymous proxy server to circumvent the content filters on the computer. Proxy servers, which are actually computers that are located beyond the firewall of the school or companys system, can easily be accessed by anyone through the Internet. All you have to do if you wish to unblock a restricted website is to connect to a proxy server, which may be located anywhere on the globe. Then, acting as a third party intermediary, the server makes the connection with the blocked website using its own IP address. Once it gains access, it shows you the contents of the website and you can even interact with the site through the intermediary server. This way, you are able to unblock a restricted website because it is the intermediary server that made the connection and not your computer.Peter Garant has written many articles about Proxys for a recently launched website about New Proxies. Visit How to Unblock a Blocked Website Using a Proxy.
