The following trick will allow you to view some BBS services with out having to register, or some technical sites that require a log-in you might be able to access the data so you dont need to have accounts all over the intertubes. When this gets banned out just change to any other bots see the last bit of the post for all bot info I took from the dasblog source code.
alter your settings to the following:
User Agent: Googlebot/2.1
Compatible: http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html
You can do so in Opera with ease. Firefox offers an extension which is downloadable from the official website.
to set up the plugin, click on add, the name your 'agent" something like: google
in the description text box. For the "User Agent" field, put this: Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
save it, then to acces the plugin, go to tools (next to help on the menu bar in firefox) mouse over Agent Switcher, and select google, surf away. A word of warning, some sites will ban you if they do an IP range check, or a reverse DNS check and your IP doesnt match that of their stored googlebot IP addy or DNS
For Internet Explorer you need to change registry entries.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings5.0User Agent] @="Googlebot/2.1" "Compatible"="+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html"
Save this as bot.reg and execute.
To revert the changes back, you need the following:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings5.0User Agent] @="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
Save as nobot.reg and execute.
<UserAgents>
<string>msnbot-Products/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</string>
<string>MJ12bot/v1.0.8 (http://majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)>
<string>ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1</string>
<string>ichiro/2.0 (http://help.goo.ne.jp/door/crawler.html)>
<string>Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)</string>
<string>asterias/2.0</string>
<string>www.adressendeutschland.de</string>
<string>NutchCVS/0.7.1 (Nutch; http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/bot.html; raphael@unterreuth.de)>
<string>Snapbot/1.0</string>
<string>msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</string>
<string>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)</string>
<string>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/2.3; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)</string>
<string>RufusBot (Rufus Web Miner; http://64.124.122.252/feedback.html)>
<string>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)>
<string>Gigabot/2.0/gigablast.com/spider.html</string>
<string>TurnitinBot/2.0 http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html>
<string>Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/3.0; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)</string>
<string>Sphere Scout&v4.0 (beta) - scout at sphere dot com</string>
<string>Gigabot/2.0; http://www.gigablast.com/spider.html>
<string>msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</string>
</UserAgents>
So, how do you beat all 5 major types of cloaking?
1. Beat IP Delivery: Use Google Translate as a Proxy, translating from spanish->english even though the site is already in English.
2. Beat User-Agent Cloaking: Use the FirefoxUser-Agent Switcher to spoof as GoogleBot
3. Beat Javascript Detection: Use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to turn off javascript.
4. Beat Cookie Detection: Use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to turn off cookies.
5. Beat Referer Detection: Use the Firefox RefControl Extension to prevent referer from being sent.
Using these in conjunction can be extremely effective, even at pay-for-information sites.
Doing this may be against the terms of service of the site you are visiting. There are plenty of popular sites out their that cloak content which is normally only available to paying members. While these techniques work on those sites too, be careful.
Good browsing!