Getting Around Internet Censorship: Internet Freedom

There is no better way to set me off into a mindless fury of profanity and obscenity than to censor me. I loathe censorship. It sets me off. So, here’s how to get around censorship in repressive police states like Belgium…

The Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (BAF) has urged all Belgian ISPs to block Swedish freetard site The Pirate Bay after a higher Antwerp court ordered Belgian cable company Telenet and telco Belgacom to make the site inaccessible to their subscribers. (Source)

It is not the job of a supposedly free government to ban or block access to information. That is the job of the police state. The subject matter does not matter. Whether it’s about how to knit patterned sweaters, or how to build and deploy improvised explosive devices (IEDs), blocking access is blocking access. Censorship is censorship.

I previously posted about getting around censorship where I mentioned iPredator. I’d also posted this graphic: That still holds true. You can also use Privacy.io. One benefit to Privacy.io is that you can still send email via port 25, which is blocked with iPredator. Other than that, iPredator and Privacy.io are about the same. I should note that I have tried both, and have found that Privacy.io seems to be faster than iPredator. I could be wrong, but that’s what I’ve perceived anyways.

So, the difference between iPredator and Privacy.io is pretty much nothing as far as censorship goes. Only the name changes. Here’s that same diagram from above adjusted for Privacy.io:

But I’d like to add one thing to the above method for getting around Internet Censorship though: DNS servers. Here’s an illustration of how you could still encounter problems if your ISP filters some sites via DNS filtering, and how you can solve that problem for a complete solution:

So, you can also change your DNS servers to something else other than your ISP’s DNS servers. By doing this, and using a VPN, they won’t have the faintest clue what you are doing. You can surf the web freely and anonymously.

Some DNS services include Google’s free DNS resolution services or any other DNS service. Keep in mind though, that whoever is doing your DNS resolution knows what sites you are requesting DNS resolution for… So you might want to investigate that further, and look for a DNS resolution service that has a solid privacy policy and one that doesn’t keep logs.

Here’s how DNS filtering works…

You want to visit a site, like the Pirate Bay. But “thepiratebay.org” doesn’t mean anything to your computer. Only special numbers work. Those numbers are called “IP addresses”. DNS servers match human-friendly names, like “thepiratebay.org” to those numbers, IP addresses. When your computer sends a request to your ISP’s DNS servers, your ISP can look at your request and say, “Oh… he wants to visit a site that we don’t want him to… Let’s give him a fake DNS record (IP address) or nothing at all for that site so that he can’t visit it.”

So there you have it. How to get around censorship on the Internet.

And if your ISP blocks you before you can even make a connection to iPredator or Privacy.io, there are more VPN services out there that you can connect to. They can’t block them all.

Cheers, and happy FREEDOM surfing!

Ryan