Ever tried accessing a particular website and all you got was the site is not reachable? Well, you might have experienced some form of internet censorship. The internet is supposed to be open and accessible to everyone. But due to different ideologies, freedom of expression and protection against harmful content, most ISPs, enterprises, and Government regimes have put in place mechanisms to ensure you only access what they deem best.
Internet censorship can be both helpful and harmful. For instance, restricting access to adult sites in a children environment is helpful. But shutting down access to Wikipedia, social media, blogs, and the entire internet is very harmful and violates freedom of expression. To avoid internet censorship, you have to bypass the mechanisms put in place.
How internet censorship works?
Internet censorship works by targeting specific or entire internet resources. Depending on the implementation, most censorship work by blocking and filtering domain names, IP addresses, URL keywords, and even the whole infrastructure. Other more technical censorships use deep packet inspection, packet filtering, and even spoofing sites.
Bypassing internet censorship
The good thing about technology is that most implementations have a loophole and finding it changes everything. For internet censorship, you can’t control all the internet resources entirely. This makes it difficult to achieve total internet censorship. Using some services and tools, you can utilize the lack of total control and access the internet freely. We’ll look at various ways and what methods of internet censorship they bypass;
Changing your DNS
This is the least powerful method of circumventing internet censorship. It usually works when access to the internet is restricted at the DNS level. ISPs and other authorities can filter or block certain DNS and hence restrict access to some sites. When this happens, browsers may fail to show a website or return an incorrect address, usually the one controlled by the authorities.
Changing your DNS will defeat this form of censorship. But knowing the right DNS to use can be daunting. To avoid the hassle of looking for one, you can try Google’s public DNS, Cloudflare or Quad9 DNS.
Using encrypted proxies