By David Ponce
Proxies are useful. You wanna look at forbidden stuff. Sysadmins conspire with your boss/principal/The Man to keep you away from that forbidden stuff. What do you do? You go through a proxy website and flip’em the bird.
Problem is, sysadmins catch on, and block your access to the proxy as well. So, you’re stuck looking for a new one, which you use until they block it too. But what site is likely to never, ever be blocked at all, simply because it’s not a proxy? Google of course.
It’s not a proxy… until now.
The hack, carefully documented here lets you use Google’s translate feature to view the site in question. Simply type in your browser address bar: http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.forbiddensite.com. If you look closely, what it’s doing is simply translating a page from English TO English. So your request goes to Google, and Google serves you your hot potato page all nice and clean and looking like lillies.
And there you have it.
[Google As Proxy Hack] VIA [Digg]
[…] digg Referer OhGizmo! Referer Link […]
[…] A short description of the google “proxy” method can be read here, (ohgizmo.com) and a long description here(oreillynet.com). Basicly, if you have half a nut, you can figure it out by looking at this url: http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.forbiddensite.com […]
And its currently working from China (although like many loopholes, this will change soon no doubt).
Yay!
Works for me, but the only thing is flash stuff still wont work. 🙁
Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends #90
Here is my weekly selection of articles that were not mentioned here — except if I missed them. The Internet Is Broken The cover story of Technology Review has been divided into three parts for presentation online. This is part…
It is irresponsible to promote Google as a proxy when it is not. There is an interesting discussion about this topic at proxy.org:
http://proxy.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1135445569
it isn’t “irresponsible” to promote google as a proxy at all.
yes, google won’t provide all the tinfoil hat privacy you’re looking for, but it can provide a way for those high school systems where even webpages with the word proxy in them are blocked.
it is irresponsible to promote a thread on a forum containing an “interesting discussion” when there isn’t really much discussion going on, if any discussion at all.
[…] https://ohgizmo.com/2005/12/21/use-google-as-a-free-almost-perfect-proxy/ […]
ug,, it doesnt work for us cause the school blocked “web translations” , sooo .. gay.
Hi Lucy! Photo I received! Thanks!
Doesn’t work anymore =[
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Hack again?!