Employers and educational establishments prefer employees and students to spend their time productively—this includes using internet access for work-related research. The ever-growing popularity of social networking (i.e. Facebook) has led to many people preferring to spend their days keeping in touch with friends, or playing the latest apps, on social networking sites — using company resources.
To combat this growing trend of work-time online socializing, many businesses and institutions have attempted to restrict access to any, or all, social networking sites and forums. For any establishment using an Intranet-based system, this can be as simple as instructing a server to block access to these sites – and for the more-advanced systems, a record can be kept of the individual terminals attempting to logon to any restricted URL addresses.
How to bypass any Intranet System that blocks Facebook Using a Proxy Address
This technique will work for any of the social networking sites but for this example we will use Facebook. What you will need is what is commonly referred to as a ‘Facebook proxy’. This is a website that allows you to access Facebook via that website. This means that any Intranet system will only see the user as visiting the proxy website (which is unrestricted) and due to the way that the website redirects a user to Facebook, the blocked URL address is hidden from the Intranet server.
Here is an example using a proxy website called UnblockF.com. This site can be used to access many of the social networking sites and is 100% free to use. By following the simple instructions on the site for accessing Facebook, a user can be taken directly to Facebook’s log-in page. Whereas a normal URL address for this page would be “http://facebook.com”, accessing Facebook via UnblockF.com will give a URL address like “unblockf.com/index.php?q=aHRocDovL3d3dy5rnYWNlYm9vay5jl”. As you can see, this URL address has no mention of the dreaded Facebook URL and will be completely invisible to any Intranet server that has instructions to block access to the Facebook website.
Even after logging in and accessing further Facebook pages the Facebook URL will still be completely hidden, using the same UnblockF.com URL format. (Note: Facebook may ask a user to answer a few simple questions when they first logon to the site via a new proxy address. This is because Facebook does not recognize this address and wants some confirmation).
Another point to remember is that accessing any site via a proxy address will add a small time-delay to any function performed. This is nothing more than a few extra seconds to load the next page and is certainly worth the wait to have unrestricted work-time access to your favorite website.
Here are a few more Facebook proxy websites: facebookproxy.net, icanaccess.com, faceoxy.com. You can find many other similar (and fresh) sites by doing a simple search on Google for “Facebook proxy”.
Some clever Intranet administrators may notice that a lot of people are suddenly visiting certain random websites (the proxy sites) and may start to block access to these. It is a good idea to vary which Facebook proxy sites you use and to keep this technique to yourself — don’t be tempted to broadcast it to all your other friends, or colleagues, suffering Facebook withdrawal. This may seem mean, but so is losing your own Facebook access due to sloppy track-covering by colleagues.
Now you know how you can access Facebook anywhere, anytime, using a very simple technique!