A little tutorial found on the italian site www.manuali.net inspired me for this hack. That tutorial suggests to translate a webpage, using Google translator, to access it even if restricted.

It worked fine but something else was needed... why translate?!

...

Ok, let's start from the beginning. We all know that Google is more than a search engine; we do use it as provider for email, mapping, news and many other services. Google is now also a free proxy service. Proxy is a device that stands between a PC and the internet, providing all the connections to the world wide web. What a proxy does is to receive all data from a requested site, so when you access web pages all data come from proxy.

What's the purpose for Google as a proxy? We often use office/school/university connections, usually those services are set to provide more safety, blocking the access to undesidered web sites (the "black list"). What you can do now is use Google translator service (language tools) as a proxy to bypass the restrictions set for our connection!

You just need to type the following URL:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.forbiddensite.com
(www.forbiddensite.com stands for the URL you need to go to...)

What you'll get is the translation (english to english!) of the page you want to see... your connection is directed to a google.com page so this page won't be blocked (would be blocked only with google.com on the black list), no matter what's the content.

Notice that the URL has been a little hacked because the parameter "langpair"⁽¹⁾ is set to "en|en" (english/english) so the page is processed by Google but you can keep the original language of the page (no need to translate!). If you need another language (e.g. french) you just need to set the parameter langpair to "fr|fr" and you'll be able to read french pages in french!

A couple of examples:

english... http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=hacks.oreilly.com

italian (my own homepage!)... http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=it|it&u=www.bigthistle.altervista.org

Last but not least: if you use this trick, you're not sure to protect your privacy, this kind of connection lets you see blacklisted pages but doesn't hide your IP address. Just go to http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.whatismyip.com to see your IP is not hidden...

That's all, bye.

bigthistle
click here if you want to contact me.

⁽¹⁾ This parameter has a couple of languages: the first is the original one, the second is the one you want to translate in.

See also: The italian version of this hack