I'm a scholar and we make use of IE8 which is provided for everybody.
What not only I but surely others in a relative situation may find useful is a portable web browser that has the ability to (not really sure what the correct terms are):
- Bypass (?) the security settings and/or programs set by the higher authority to block blacklisted websites such as Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Would like feedback soon, thanks!
Depending upon how the blocking is being done, there already are ways to get to blocked sites, however, most of those work-arounds cannot be performed from inside the system, so a browser can't really do it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=proxy&cat=all
My personal favorite is Cocoon which works like a charm.
Just install them to your copy of firefox portable.
If the blocking is done on the firewall to any proxy/anonymizers then these kind of plugins wont work. Also, if the company is blocking these kind of requests, they might be logging traffic as well so Im not sure how advisable it is to go round bypassing network rules. Still thats not my problem so I couldnt care less, if you got caught. If you are good enough to not get caught though, you probably wouldn't ask this question.