If you are really insistent about getting around the company firewall, DataMike had a reasonably easy solution. There are a number of such “safe surfing” services, which have the obvious drawback that they will also eventually be placed on the “blocked” list.
You will notice that what those services do is parse the delivered content and rewrite the URL’s in all the links to be routed again through their site. For instance, the message board link http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb becomes a link to safeweb with the “real” url as an argument, so that safeweb can simply fetch that page and process it for you, too.
The decimilization solution would work if you could perform similar URL rewriting on your delivered pages to change all the http://boards.straightdope.com links to decimilized addresses. As observed, the links on the delivered page still say “straightdope”.
There are some pitfalls with URL rewriting, BTW. If the URL’s are extremely unusual, it may confuse the parsing and screw up the links. I have seen this recently with content in which all the actions on links are heavily javascripted, so that rather than going somewhere directly, every click on the page performed some sort of javascript-based processing first. URL rewriting usually makes a total hash of that, of course. (the context I’ve seen this in is working with app servers that try to handle session control this way when working with a browser that won’t honor cookies - the rewriting is used to insert the session identifier in all the URL’s pointing back into the server site).
If I were writing a “corporate nanny” firewall, I think I would have an option to try to parse outgoing URL’s for other URL’s embedded in the arguments or POST fields, and block on that basis as well, so people couldn’t relay through something like safeweb. Maybe they do.
Which leads to an idle thought I just had. If corporate blockers can be circumvented by routine URL translation like this, I could write a very annoying (from their point of view) utility which would be installed as an HTTP proxy on your machine, and would simply perform URL rewriting as desired. On windows systems, make it manifest as a system tray app, and allow you to interactively add locations to be rendered in alternate forms, such as turned into IP’s, decimilized as discussed, embedded in some other syntax, or converted into a different site. Or, for that matter, simply ignored or turned into some local reference, so you could get the benefit of stripping out ad banners through the same tool. I’ve got a “filtration” proxy like this I developed and was thinking of commercializing for different purposes a couple years ago… hmmmm …