Saudi Arabia uses the Smartfilter filtering program to censor Internet access within the country, as documented in a report from the OpenNet Initiative. (Smartfilter is made by Secure Computing, which has been extensively criticized for allowing their software to be used by the censorious Saudi regime. Secure Computing is now owned by anti-virus company McAfee.)
The easiest way to bypass Smartfilter (whether in an American school or workplace, or in a country like Saudi Arabia that uses it to filter traffic nationally) is to use a proxy site like https://www.stupidcensorship.com/. If you find a proxy site that isn't blocked, you can go to the proxy site and type in the URL of the page that you want to view, and it will fetch it for you. The problem is that most widely known proxy sites are already blocked by filtering programs like Smartfilter. If you can find it, then the odds are that Smartfilter can find it too.
The solution is to sign up for a proxy mailing list like our "Circumventor" list. The Circumventor mailing list mails out new proxy sites several times per week, so that by the time one of them is blocked by Smartfilter (and by the time the database has been updated on the Saudi servers running Smartfilter), the next one has usually been mailed out already, so that the latest site almost always works. We have about 230,000 users on our proxy mailing list, a large portion of whom use our proxies from Saudi Arabia (as well as in other heavily censored countries like China and the United Arab Emirates).
To join our Circumventor proxy mailing list, enter your e-mail address below: