Yelp.com blocked from my work address

Yelp.com is blocked from my work internet. Not by any filtering on the part of the office (it is a shared office building with shared internet.) My wild guess is Yelp banned the range of IP addresses from the office because maybe some other tenant here was abusing the site? Or maybe some DNS or something else is just whacky and broken? It is nothing on my laptop, the same laptop can access Yelp.com fine from my home internet.

I find it annoying, how could I get Yelp unblocked? It's been this way for 6 months or so. I just want to look up a restaurant to order lunch from and I can't, just annoying. How could I figure out why Yelp is inaccessible? (the only site I've seen that shows up as "Forbidden: No access on this server".) How could I get around this access block?

blocking

MikeN

Posted 2009-10-13T15:21:59.007

Reputation: 1 024

you can use google translater like proxy sometimes it helps) – Ishikawa Yoshi – 2012-07-24T02:13:04.787

For your connection is this through the 3G connection or through WiFi? – Joshua K – 2009-10-13T15:49:13.413

How do you know that the site is blocked? What exactly happens when you try to access it? – innaM – 2009-10-13T15:49:16.503

@Manni: Forbidden: No access on this server...? – Arjan – 2009-10-13T15:57:50.433

Wow. OK. In that case, I'd try to contact their support from home and see what happens. – innaM – 2009-10-13T16:18:37.927

Answers

How could I get around this access block?

Your options:

You can setup a VPN connection, using a software like Hotspot Shield
You can use TOR Firefox addon
You can use online proxy services like Kproxy, Privoxy
You can mail Yelp support and find why is it that the IP is banned.

Sathyajith Bhat

Posted 2009-10-13T15:21:59.007

Reputation: 58 436

@innaM It's worth noting that yelp doesn't respond to either emails or phone calls. – Slater Victoroff – 2014-07-09T14:28:55.423

I'd definitely start with the last option. – innaM – 2009-10-14T11:26:07.740

Go through the Google servers. Google has an option to format any page for mobile devices. Just use http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://yelp.com. It doesn't look pretty, but it has a chance of working.

This works with any web page; just replace yelp.com with whatever you want. All links going from that page will still be formatted for mobiles. This also has the advantage of reducing web traffic; all images seem to be compressed automatically by Google. If you don't want images either, just append &_gwt_noimg=1 at the end of the URL above.