How To Access Blocked Websites

Being a student it is a bitter experience when you find social websites like Orkut, Facebook etc blocked by the internet administrator. There are many such kind of restrictions that can be applied to any website so that you are unable to perform any work with it. As you try to open the website or want to download some contents from it, a warning message appears Access Denied contact the administrator. Do not get disheartened, if there is a restriction then there will be some ways to bypass most of them. There are many softwares that can do this job, but thing is they are not free and bit difficult for a newbie to configure properly. Here are two free softwares that can perform these tasks for you.

UltraSurf

This is a very small and portable application. When started it connects to its servers and by default is associated with Internet Explorer. If you use are provided with proxy address from your administrator, before connecting you have to put it in UltraSurf’s settings. Now you can visit the website you always wanted.

If you want to use with other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc. You can do it easily by first connecting UltraSurf to its servers then setting the connection type of the browser from No proxy to Manual proxy and give address as”127.0.0.1″ and port as “9666”. This port number can be obtained as UltraSurf connects to its server. By the same way you can also put these settings in your download managers and download blocked files. It connects to three servers and automatically toggles between the best server available.

All the settings of UltraSurf are easy and are mostly oriented with IE. If you are not using Internet Explorer with it, then there is no need for any configuration.

This utility is very easy to use, has no advanced settings� and can be used anywhere you like.

Download: UltraSurf

Your Freedom

Well compared to the previous one this software is slightly heavier and works best with advanced configurations. But it can be easily used by general users also.

To use this software you have to first register at Your-freedom.net. This registration is free and would not take much time. You can also get a detailed information on how does these softwares work on their site.

As you install and run this application for the first time, settings wizard will open and take you to step by step configuration.

Steps in configuring

The first screen that appears is a welcome screen, pressing next brings the next window. Here you� have to enter details of your proxy address and port if you are provided that by your administrator. If you use a direct connection to internet you can leave this blank.

The next window shows a list of protocols, these can be selected as a preference to the kind of server to be searched. If you do not understand these protocols leave them as they are all selected.

Given the preferences, it automatically searches for all nearby available freedom servers. As the search is finished you will be given a list of servers found. You can use the server with highest priority and supporting the protocols you required.

As you select the server, You have to enter the user name and password registered at Your-freedom. Press the start connection button to connect to the server.

Then click on the Applications tab, there is a list of applications that can be used with this application. Close the applications and select them in your freedom. Then select configure applications and press ok. To revert the changes select restore and press ok. You can also control the speed of data flow from the freedom servers.

With your freedom being connected the application configured to it will start using the selected server, and you can browse your loved sites and download applications.

Download: Your Freedom

Note: The latest version of full windows installer did not work on my system running Windows7. You can give it a try if it does not work then try an older version,� file named ” freedom-20091103-01.exe “. This worked fine.

My Verdict

Both the mentioned softwares are useful as I have been using them from last 5 years. UltraSurf can be used by anyone and especially in cases where you need portability and Your Freedom can be used by basic users also but it is best suited for advanced users. There are some situations where both of these can fail to connect to their respective servers. This happens only when blocking techniques used are very strong. Speed through these softwares can be slow and give a bad browsing experience, so I suggest you to configure a browser like Firefox with them and use only when you want to access blocked sites, and use other browser such as Chrome that uses direct internet connection for general sites, so that your browsing speed is maintained.