As the Internet gets more interesting, people waste more and more time on it.  There's videos, chatting, browsing, blogging, trolling, posting, calling, tagging, poking, updating, and tweeting to get done, and there's not enough time to do it in.  Employers know this, and to prevent it, many of these social networking and entertainment sites are blocked in the work place. Schools are aware that kids can't control themselves, and most school networks have blocked these sites.  Entire countries feel threatened by this kind of social media, and communist/dictatorial government around the world have outlawed them.  But is there a way to access blocked websites?

Yes.

Websites are blocked with firewalls, which pretty much everyone is familiar with this term.  Most people don't really know how they work, but everyone know to keep your firewall on to keep out malware and other malicious websites/software.  But firewalls can be used to restrict the Internet as well.  Any sort of "kid filters" are done with firewalls.  The network at your school and workplace is protected and restricted by a firewall.  You may have heard of The Great Firewall of China.  How do  we bypass firewall restrictions and access blocked websites?

Anonymous surfing tools are available on the Internet, and they help Internet users from around the world, for good or bad, bypass firewall restrictions.  This is not a term that many people are familiar with, but it is exactly what it sounds like.  Your IP address is connected to you - it shows a lot about the device you connect to the Internet with, and can even be used to access your login credentials for various websites or view your browsing history.  When you surf the Internet anonymously, you borrow an IP address from another place - an IP address that's not connected to anyone in particular, and you use this as your "front man" to the Internet.  This anonymous IP address is basically how you can access blocked websites.

With an IP address that most people aren't aware of - a "virtual" IP address that is connected to no one (you're not hijacking someone else's IP), data can be traced to the IP, but it can't be trace to you.  This is called "anonymous surfing", because no one really knows who you are. At it's best, anonymous surfing can help users in countries that censor the Internet to access blocked websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other blocked news sites.  At its worse, anonymous surfing can be used to send out spam and do illegal things online. Either way, an anonymous IP address is a legal and effective way to access blocked websites from anywhere.