There are a lot of different methods that blocking applications use to filter sites, and many ways to get around them. Some have been mentioned in the thread but I didn't see anyone mention TOR. If you all haven't looked at that, TOR is an interesting anonymizing system that bounces your traffic through multiple servers around the world encrypting it in several layers. This prevents the intermediate systems from seeing your traffic and your source is hidden from the site you visit. It also works well in getting around a lot of blocking systems that get thrown up in countries or company/school networks. For firefox you can get it as an add on (tor button).
Alternativity, there are a few other quick tips:
1) search the site in google and view the cached page. When you want to search only a specific site in google, example: we want to search TSP for solar power....
in the google search bar type: Site:thesurvivalpodcats.com solar power
This restricts the search to that site only. Any results that seem interesting, open up the cached link for that page. This gets you most of the details of the site, while not having to access the site. Some blocking tools block google cache views though.
2) look up the IP address for the site and access it that way. Some networks and providers may block sites by dns by giving bad information to redirect you elsewhere. If dns is not blocked, search google's dns (from the DOS prompt: nslookup thesurvivalpodcast.com 8.8.8.8) or use a dns lookup tool on the web (
http://network-tools.com/nslook/) to get the ip of the site. Then just browse to the IP:
http://174.36.118.25. This won't always work, especially if there are more than one website hosted at that IP address.