Daily product hacking tips and tricks

It’s completely understood why schools and workplaces has a clear interest in blocking Facebook. The thing is that our interest as Facebook enthusiasts is exactly the opposite :)

In essence we have two main ways to access a blocked website:

* Use a free proxy website. The problem with web proxies is that in general they are low quality and/or spammy and tend to get blocked quite often by schools and enterprises.
* Remote control a PC that has access to the blocked site (in this case Facebook).

So for my readers, here are a few ways to unblock Facebook at school:

* Install the Facebook Access at School application on your home PC and promote it among your friends. The cool thing about this app, is that once installed it searches for accessible (non-blocked) proxies websites. So once in school, all you’ll need to do it contact a friend/family relative that has facebook access and runs this application and ask him to let you know the URLs of currently accessible proxies. Once you have the URL, access it via your school or workplace Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or other web browser and surf to Facebook.
* If you can’t get hold of any friend/family member, try to unblock Facebook using a proxy website from this proxy list.
* You can also try to remote control your home PC (that has access to Facebook) from school. There are a few free (or free to try) apps that you can use for this task. I recommend to use Crossloop or Remote Admin as your remote control software. The main downside of this method are that somes chools and workplaces might not allow you to install the remote control software on their PCs, so this method won’t always be applicable.

If you happen to be aware of other tricks that allow you to access Facebook from school or work, you are welcome to share them with us by posting a comment below.

Update: Many readers asked whether the circumvention methods mentioned in this blog post are applicable to other social networks or sites that tend to get blocked . The answer is positive. You can try these methods with Xanga, Hi5, Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, AIM Express, Rapidshare, Megaupload, MSN ( Live), Hotmail, GMail, AOL, Yahoo Mail etc’