Sunday 26 December 2010

Bypass web filters of Nepali ISPs

Well okay, I am here to rescue you if you are facing the problem of finding the website you want to visit getting blocked by the ISPs. After NTA sent the letters to the ISPs in Nepal to block the sites with some potentially bad contents, ISPs have started doing filtering and blocking of the websites. In this post, I am going to show you how to bypass the web filters being applied by the ISPs. I've tested with the websurfer ISP but still you might find one of these ways working for you.

Method #1:
So I assume you are searching for some stuffs in the torrent and lets say your search query goes to the URL.
For example, I search for sex comedy movie in torrentz.eu, the search query would result in a URL like:
http://torrentz.eu/search?f=sex+comedy+movie

Unfortunately websurfer blocks the keywork sex from the URL query so we get the page like below:


Now lets change our query by searching with the caps version of sex i.e. SEX to bypass such filtering. The new URL after entering search keywords would be:

http://torrentz.eu/search?f=SEX+comedy+movie

And this time you get the valid webpage with your expected search results. Wasn't that easy bypassing this lame blocking?
Method #2:
I was checking the lists of the websites which were being blocked by Nepali ISPs and my eyes caught utube.com and I tried opening it. But it was another site to be blocked.
Check the screenshot below:



This time I am using the internet protocol address (IP Address of the website) to visit the website. In order to find the IP of any website, you can simply do:

ping utube.com

This will give you the IP of the website. For utube.com, the associated IP was 67.192.184.210 so now on your browser, type the address of the website as http://67.192.184.210 and that would bypass and open the website.



Method #3:
Using proxy
While this tends to be slow for me, you can use the freely available proxies to bypass the web filters. I will leave this technique to do on your own as there are hundreds of tutorials on how to use proxies. Anyway, I leave you with the site called Samair.ru which consists of tons of proxies to be used.

Also, you might try installing the TOR software in your system(works pretty well for me).


Method #4:
Another way is to use the alternative DNS servers which will work perfectly if the ISP is blocking the websites based on DNS resolutions. You can use the DNS servers from OpenDNS or Google or you may google for other free DNS servers. Be sure to choose the good DNS server while doing so. The good thing about OpenDNS is that it also provides anti-phishing protection that your ISP might not be providing.

Google's DNS IPs: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
OpenDNS IPs: 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222

You can then set up the DNS servers either in router or your PC as required.

Method #5 and more:
I will update this post when I test things more and more. I haven't tested with VPNs, google cache, translators, etc. These days, ISPs are also blocking the websites by combining the above discussed methods further aided by the deep packet inspection.

I hope this helps some of you out there. Thanks.