How to Bypass Websense Twitter block

Posted by admin on Jan 29, 2010 in tips

The company I work for has recently introduced Websense to filter out certain sites which they believe to be non-conducive to a working environment. This is not such a bad this as they block certain sites which are deemed to hold malware and other things.

However Websense is quite bad in that it restricts what users can view and this I disagree with. It’s more than a Malware site filter it also blocks social networking sites and many blogs. Twitter is not a bad site and I wanted to check a tweet of a user who had posted something interesting regarding testing and website security.

But because we have websense it was blocked all I got was the message .

This Websense category is filtered: Social Networking and Personal Sites.
URL:

http://twitter.com/

The other thing I think is bad regarding the use of Websense is that users will attempt to bypass it. Its in their nature especially if you have a team of Web-testers.

So if you don’t want a bunch of proxies and ssh tunnels installed in your network it’s better to just leave it for users to be responsible enough to decide what is a site worthy of visiting in work time.

So now on to the quick and dirty hack to get your twitter feeds on a network that is using Websense.

You can either load up http://www.twittergadget.com/ which is a IGoogle Plugin – It allows tweeting and reading of other tweets from the your personalised Google Homepage.

TIP: I advise that you turn off the thumbnails in twittergadget or your browser will still attempt to make calls which will be logged by Websense. Once thumbnails are tuned off Websense never logs any twitter traffic. so you still can make and receive feeds without Websense being any the wiser.

or you can use the below link which allows reading only

Bypass Websense for all Tweets which have the Term Test

You could just as easilly insert the peoples names who tweets you follow and that will work.

Hope you found it useful