We have all been in a situation where we needed to satisfy our never ending itch for cat videos, but were frustrated by firewalls or filters put in place. I can remember this time when I absolutely needed to browse reddit to satisfy my craving for useless information, but the workplace had banned it. It was pretty frustrating, and I couldn’t concentrate at all on my work that day. So keeping the productivity of employees in mind, I’ve listed a few ways to bypass a firewall or internet filter put in place at work, home, college or anywhere else for that matter.
How to bypass a Firewall or Internet Filter
Evade firewalls or filters by using proxies
In older days, you had to be a bit of a geek in order to use proxies properly, & even then there was no guarantee that it would work. But nowadays, web proxies make bypassing firewalls or internet filters a breeze. All you have to know is how to click a mouse and type on a keyboard! Easiest technique of all.
A few sites are given below:
 
Hidemyass has a very good IP:port proxy list listed here, that works as well for bypassing firewalls or internet filters but in my experience they are pretty slow. So far I have found that web proxies tend to have better performance.
Evade firewalls or filters by direct browsing through IP address
Even though the chances of this working is pretty slim, you might as well give it a shot. Back in the days when filtering was new and sysadmins weren’t wise to ways of hackers, browsing by IP was guaranteed to let you browse all the blocked sites. But unfortunately the sysadmins wised up and nowadays they have better filters. Still, it doesn’t hurt to give it a try. Do the following:
1. Go to this webaddress: http://ping.eu/ping/ and type the name of the site you want to browse into the textbox.
In the above image, you can see the address for Facebook is 66.220.152.19. So you would type http://66.220.152.19 into the browser and if the filter/firewall is weak, then you can bypass it using this method also.
One last thing, if for some reason you can’t access ping.eu, then follow the below steps to discover the IP address of any website:
1. Open a command prompt by clicking on the Start menu button and typing ‘cmd’ and then press enter (for Vista & above).
2. Type the following command and insert the name of the site you want to browse in the place of SITENAME: ping -4 SITENAME. An example would be: ping -4 facebook.com.
As you can see from the above image, the IP address for facebook is: 173.252.110.27.
Comments, feedback are always welcome.