Every school nowadays has some kind of "content filter" on the internet connection. This internet connection is usually really fast, ideal for surfing everything2 or videos from collegehumor. But, of course, those sites are all blocked. (which is retarded, considering that E2 is one of the most educational websites there are. But, it's also got information on how to make bombs and porn, so it's out.) If you could get around that filter, you could do those things, but you can't. That filter tells you Bess can't go there or igear: DENIED whenever you try. But you can get around these filters a number of ways, like the pros do.

The First, and easiest way, to get to a website that's blocked out, is to use its IP address. http://Everything2.com may be blocked out, but most likely, http://206.170.14.131 isn't. Simply go to your favorite nslookup site and look up the IP for whatever site you want.

However, the admins might catch on and start blocking sites by IP address and domain name. If they start to do this, you can go to the decimal equivlent of the IP address. See IP address tricks for how to convert, or use my handy TI-BASIC program here to to the converting for you.

:Disp "Enter IP address one","section at a time","and press enter","between each."
:Input a
:Input b
:Input c
:Input d
:Disp (a*16777216) + (b*65536) + (c*256) + (d)

Then you can go to http://3467251331/ to get to E2.

In serious situations, they might start blocking out that, too. Or, maybe your school has a really heavy duty filter that protects against this sort of thing. In that case, you can use a CGI proxy to get around censorware. http://www.anonymizer.com is an example, but you can find a lot more if you search.

If your school blocks out all the ones you can find, you can set up your own. Download the source in perl at http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/. Then, put it on your server or get an account with F2S.com and put it there. With minor modifications, you can make it ROT13 the URLs it passes, which will let you download forbidden filetypes such as .MP3 or .EXE. If they catch on to that, you can simply change the proxy's filename and be back in business.

Or you could go to www.peacefire.org on a non-blocked computer, print out directions to disable whatever censorware is on the desired computer, and proceed to kill the program. They have a way to disable every censorware I've ever come across.

If you're just trying to get some quick information off of a single page (this can be quite tedious for multiple pages), you can use the dialectizer at rinkworks.com to translate the website into some different dialect and display it for you. Of course, it's put through the rinkworks cgi first, and then displayed to you, so it technically doesn't come from the other site. You can also use other net language translators to do this, like translator.go.com.

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