Thwart those firewalls

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Yes, I'm gonna tell u right that.
The quest started when my company blocked orkut. My expression was "WTF!!I can't use orkut??". Hell, i tried a bit and here it is for all of u.
Well, for IM's the best tool i found was hopster.
Download hopster. Install and let it configure itself. Might take abt 10-15 mins for that.
Then fire up ur fav IM. Set it to use a socks5 proxy with server 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and port 1080.
Also ask it to use proxy to resolve hostnames. And u r ready to go chatting.
However, u cant use yahoo msgr this way cuz yahoo doesn't allow logins from systems that have yahoo msgr and proxy servers running on the same system.
Also, u can't use hopster with any browsers (like IE, Mozilla firefox etc) cuz there was no option to let it use the local proxy to resolve hostnames.
Then what.
WTF, there is a solution for that too.
Download sockscap , a tool that'll add socks support to any of ur apps. So, just d/l and install sockscap. Add ur apps to it. Also set sockscap to use the local proxy that u r running (hopster). And there u r ready to go.
So, in these 2 ways, u can thwart most firewalls.
The only drawback is that u'll get limited speeds for free version of hopster (abt 5 kbps) but for just 2$ per month, u can get much more bandwidth.
So, thats it for today.
Happy surfing. :)