Some examples are, companies blocking, personal email services like gmail and yahoo. In most cases the mail services might not be not be blocked. However, there are social sites like orkut, myspace, face book and bebo which do get affected with the companies policy of blocking such sites. We are not going to discuss the moral or ethical connotation of this implementation.

So what is the solution when these sites are blocked in your organization and you want to use them. Please remember that your actions can put you in trouble because you’ll be violating the companies policy. And this post is just for educational and knowledge purpose. What we are going to see is how you can bypass the firewall to access sites like, orkut, myspace, facebook and many others.

There are services which are called as proxy and can help you bypass your companies firewall. Let’s see what proxy does. This is what wikipedia has to say:

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application program) which services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server. The proxy server provides the resource by connecting to the specified server and requesting the service on behalf of the client.

You can read more about proxies here.

So all you have to do is to use a proxy service to bypass your company’s corporate firewall. There are 2 ways of using proxy services.

1. Web based proxies: These are very easy to use. You have to go to proxy website and just enter the website that you want to visit.
2. Proxy Servers: In this method you have to use the IP address of an open proxy server. You can get a complete list http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html or by just searching for “Proxy Servers” in Google.

Now let’s check what are proxy services available for Orkut, facebook, myspace and bebo:

http://proxyshare.net/

http://surfcovertly.com

You can also search for “web proxy” on Google for more proxies. Also, we must warn our readers that by nature, these proxy sites are naughty and can use your information for bad purposes so we strongly suggest you to use them at your own risk.