Popular site Boing Boing was recently censored in United Arab Emirates and blocked at companies using Smart Filter by Secure Computing. Fortunately, Web Sense (which my company uses) hasn’t blocked Boing Boing yet. But it might anyday. But many legitimate sites are being blocked everyday by web and internet filtering softwares. So as a workaround, I do the following if a site is blocked by Web Sense at my company:

1) Visit an HTTPS secure proxy site like Proxy System’s https://proxysystems.net/proxy-index.php. Secure sites cannot be blocked by internet filtering sites unless the IP address itself has been blocked by the company at the router level.

2) Go to Cosmopod.com which offers a free personal online remote desktop to a Linux based machine. All you need to is download their small remote desktop client and then log into a remote Linux machine with Firefox installed. The entire session is again encrypted over SSL so no one knows what data is being transferred.

These two ways are possibly the safest ways to browse websites in your company without arousing any suspicion:)

Update: There a service called SecureIX that provides a free PPTP VPN connection for personal use. Now you can access any website, IRC chat room, download P2P/Bittorrent files or play online games without the need for any proxy.