Archive for May 18th, 2015

How to circumvent the free Wi-Fi content filter, for fame & profit

I’m very grateful for the free Wi-Fi on the train, the coffee shop or the municipal free Wi-Fi, but the content filter they have on their proxies is sometimes really weird – for example it may blocks one of my favorite podcasts website (the Jupiter Broadcasting network) under the category “streaming media” even though they don’t actually host their video files, but they do let through YouTube and Facebook (where most cat videos are posted these days). So apparently Israeli Rail has an aversion to streaming media so they won’t let me send an email to a small podcast, but I can watch all the cat videos I want. Weird. Also, most VPN services are blocked by default, so no help will be coming from that way1.

So, to fix that, here’s a small workaround using an external proxy – this is rather simple, but it does assume you have all kinds of tools that most users won’t have just lying around – but if you’re a Linux geek you should do just fine.

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  1. I’ve checked the OpenVPN ports are blocked, as well as all web-based proxies I could find, such as FoxyProxy and Hola. I’ve encountered in the past a weird VPN software that does not use standard UDP or TCP sockets, but instead using GRE packets and I have no idea if that would work, but I’m assuming it won’t as well. []