So my work set up a new filter and I can no longer check in on twistypuzzles.com on my lunch break. Does anyone know of any obscure proxy servers that would let me log in. I'm pretty sure just about all of the searchable proxy servers are blocked too. Or is there another way around this? I think it's blocked because "puzzle" is in the name and it assumes it's a game website.
Oh well, I guess I'll just have to read this at home.

-d

Darryl, the same thing has happened to me over the years. I had to go to IT once and say that puzzle is not the same as game, and they unblocked it for me.

failing that, I think Sandy might have given me some links on how to bypass the blocks. It is here in off topic somewhere. Good luck getting past the blocks.

Instead, where TwistyPuzzles is blocked, use http://d56538.u22.qwknetllc.com/forum/

Same thing happened to me. I planned on using my phone to tether to around it.

I tunnel all my personal web browsing traffic through an SSH tunnel (SOCKS 5 proxy) to Amazon EC2. A spot/reserved micro instance on EC2 will cost about $10 a month. I do this for safe browsing on untrusted networks rather than filter evasion but filter evasion comes as a freebie.

The "FoxyProxy" addon for Firefox makes this quite easy to do. You can define a long list of proxies and then based on regular expressions to match the URL you can choose what traffic gets proxied and to which proxy. You can also make DNS resolution happen over the proxy for DNS-based black-lists.

The advantage of running your own proxy via EC2 is that you can set it up however you'd like. If SSH isn't allowed out you can make it an HTTPS proxy. Or change the SSH port. Or whatever you want to do.

For those of you that don't want to spend a long time learning EC2, there are pre-made proxy AMIs available that you can start up and be using in 15 minutes or less.

Also, you can get a free EC2 linux slice for a whole year.

Whether or not it's puzzles or games, it's not work appropriate, so I doubt IT will budge, even if it's my lunch break. They have to pay for bandwidth after all.

Firefox doesn't work well either, it's weird how they have it set up, but they want us using their fully patched internet explorer. Firefox, they can't control if it's patched or not.

I'll try that link that Ntype3 sent. Thanks for that, hopefully it works. If you hear from me in 4-5 hours or so, it worked

-d

I was so excited to try this, so it's before the 4 to 5 hours that I stated in the previous post. I am at work and it's working
Thanks so much!!

-d

No problem! I store the link in my gmail task list (if you have gmail). It's a great place to store it, and if you can get mail, you can get the twisty forum

I actually emailed it to myself, so I always have it. Then I book marked it at work. The only draw back is that I have to log in every time here, but it's better than nothing.

-d