Steven Benner's Blog

The whole world knows about the so called “Great Wall” that protects the Chinese people from dangerous western ideals, the serious concerns about internet privacy in the United Kingdom, now we have Australia making a real push towards internet filtering legislation as well as all of North America and most of Europe signing on with the ACTA legislation. Of course we still have Iran blocking news, social media and even gmail. But even countries that we wouldn’t expect to support censorship are signing bad legislation, such as France, New Zealand, and Ireland.

For at least a decade the very idea of filtering information was something first world countries laughed at as a tactic only dictatorships and xenophobes would seriously consider, now it seems the stage is changing and governments and ISPs are becoming more open to the idea of national censorship.

This is a terrible, and dangerous trend. I for one hope the aussies block the forced internet filtering law and I hope the whole world sees ACTA as the scam that it is. There is a quote that I often like to cite when the topic of internet filtering comes up, “The internet sees censorship as damage, and automatically routes around it”. Unfortunately, when censorship happens at the ISP level, that automatic routing is broken, so you have to do some manual routing to circumvent the broken tubes.

I think it is important to know how to get around censorship schemes and I believe that the greater the number of people with this knowledge the better off the internet, and the world will be. So here’s how to circumvent internet censorship, the VPN.

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