I should probably have called this “How to use web proxies to view what your company’s IT department doesn’t want you to see”, bit it won’t fit in the title bar. 
Sometimes, I really have to laugh at what some IT people try to do to their users. Yesterday, Gary mentioned that one of his regular commenters has had her access to blogs and Facebook cut by her company’s IT staff because they view it as a waste of time and resources.
My employer has a much more pragmatic approach that’s also borne out in research: people are not machines. We need periodic breaks from the daily grind and popping into a blog of Facebook every now and then for a few minutes actually boosts creativity and productivity. Blanket bans of reasonably harmless stuff can actually have a drastically different effect than what they’re aiming for.
Now, I’m the IT guy here. I know damn well that I simply don’t have time to stay on top the the millions of web sites that folks kill a few minutes here and there with and I certainly can’t spare the computing resources to block them. We’re talking about a huge trade-off: to keep our staff from reading a blog or two during a free minute during the day, that would literally eat up a large percentage of my time, taking me away from far more pressing projects.
Besides, firewalls are deadly simple to get around. How do you think Chinese dissidents all over the country are able to post to government-banned sites when they like? How do you suppose I access content on the BBC’s family of web sites that are supposed to be restricted to residents of the UK? The, and I, use proxy servers. A proxy is a network gateway. If you configure your browser to use one, all traffic coming to and from your machine appears to be coming to and from the proxy server. Do you need to be in the UK to access a particular site (much of the BBC’s content is restricted like this)? Pick a UK-based proxy. Want to bamboozle a friend when you post to his blog? Pick a proxy somewhere far away. I posted a comment to Gary’s blog yesterday from a proxy in Uruguay. Want to check out Facebook from behind a corporate firewall? Pick just about any proxy and that’s the traffic the firewall will see.
Four simple steps:
- Download and install Firefox. It’s quite simply the easiest browser to configure for proxies on the fly . Farm more secure than MS Internet Exploder, too.
- Download and install the SwitchProxy Tool add-on. It makes changing between proxies very easy.
- Go to ProxyRSS to find a list of open proxy servers.
- Add some of the proxies to the SwitchProxy list and surf away.
SwitchProxy will add a toolbar to the top of your browser window:
Click ‘Add’. You’re adding a ‘Standard’ proxy, so click ‘Next’. Up pops the ‘Proxy Info’ window:
This has my Uruguayan proxy in it as an example. Proxy information is given in the form of an IP address and a port number. For instance, this one’s active in the UK right now:
212.241.180.43:80
So, put the IP address in the ‘HTTP Proxy” box and 80 in the Port box. Ignore everything else in the window and click OK.
The Proxy toolbar now says “Click apply to use this proxy”:
Do it. 
If all goes well and the proxy is accepting connections, Firefox will reload your page through the proxy. Click here to check where the internet thinks you are. A word of warning: you’re putting another layer of processing between you and the internet. It WILL be slower. In my experience, it can be MUCH slower. If it’s too slow or doesn’t work at all (very possible), grab another address from the list and try again. RSSProxy checks their lists multiple times per day, so you shouldn’t have any problems finding one to fit your needs. Enjoy and let me know how it goes.