May 22, 2005

Curious George: Circumventing domain blocks. Every once in awhile over the years I've run across a website that won't let me look at it unless I'm in the .gov or .edu domain.

Now we're not talking about military or technological stuff, just open pages that any Joe Sixpack at any college or government office can look at. Isn't this a simple .htaccess block? Am I identified in my http header? I thought it was impossible to block by domain name. I know this from trying to block Chinese addresses once when I was having a bandwidth issue; you had to find IP range lists for it to remotely be effective, and even then it didn't always work. So if I really want to look at something, can I forge my http header? I figure there are no free .gov/.edu proxies.

  • Weird - anything I can't get without my university proxy server tends to be for pay academic sites (journal reprints, databases, etc), which makes sense why they would be restricted. But I've never come across anything else restricted. Do you have any sample URLs?
  • No, it's not journals I'm interested in. Google shows a few .gov and .edu examples.
  • There are companies that do IP mapping, and they know exactly were your IP (or your ISP) is located. Heck, there are even free versions now.