In an earlier article I talked about the blocking system at my school, and how dumb it is. Of course there's ways to get around it, and that's exactly what this article is about.
First: this site itself. I migrated from Google Sites to Neocities because not only did they ban editing Google Sites, but they banned the Google Sites domain (sites.google.com) as a whole. While it does work if I get a Windows laptop and use Internet Explorer, a lot of the devices are ChromeOS, meaning that I can't quite do that.
It's also important to mention that it looks educational: it's coding. I have to program in raw HTML and CSS, and since I go to a STEM school, working on the website looks pretty legitimate. While I may be told to stop, it's not nearly as bad as games, right? I'm learning skills that you'd want to know in a STEM school, after all...
No. It's almost worse, in a way. Remember that this site technically started as the "Unblocked Games Directory" (which got removed due to my idiocy) and then was "The Free Gaming Directory" which is kind of exactly what it says and kind of a front to be the original unblocked directory. Since the main reason I had the website, TFGD, was blocked at school, it was time to move it. With that, we lost the front, but I'm considering adding it back.
It's fun to mention that while the old site did get blocked, none of the sites that were on it did, and I still had access to a list at the time.
Of course, there's more that you can do to access more of the internet. One of the cool hidden features of Google is that it holds a cache of most websites, which unblocks everything blocked by the weaker system. If I want to play Tetris, I can, because I can unblock the Tetr.js dig mod through this.
However, this doesn't work with everything. It's disappointing, because the way it works makes it so some sites just break. Other sites get hit by the more powerful (but more specific) blocking system. This procedure kind of angers me, but I get why they do it.
I haven't considered the Wayback Machine until now, and testing it on Tetr.js Enhanced, it seems more capable, but not quite perfect. Archive.org is already pretty darn good for fun stuff that's not blocked, so I'll have to keep trying it out.
YouTube is restricted, so some videos don't show up on search. If I want to watch something, I usually don't go to the site. I look up the video on Google, because the link doesn't disappear from there, copy the link, then go to Streampocket and watch it that way. It works perfectly and I can also download the video for later.
As for phone use, downloads aren't limited, so if I ever have to use the school WiFi to access Twitter, I'll just use a VPN. My go-to is Ultrasurf, but there's a lot of other popular ones.
Of course, this can all get shut down manually through another system, but that's unavoidable. Always try to get some work done.