Here is a list of the top ten countries that censure the internet most harshly according to the Committee to Protect Journalists:
- Eritrea
- North Korea
- Saudi Arabia
- Ethiopia
- Azerbaijan
- Vietnam
- Iran
- China
- Myanmar
- Cuba
If you live, work, or study in one of those countries, unblocking content will be a major challenge, but not impossible. We’ll briefly cover the two most popular methods of unblocking content that is censured by a government.
Use the Tor Browser
The Tor Browser is free to download and to use on the internet. The Tor Browser is available for Linux, Mac, Windows, and mobile. You can download the desktop versions from the Tor Project website. CAUTION, the Tor browser might be illegal in some authoritarian regimes. In some cases, such as North Korea, Tor just won’t connect to the internet. Commonly just called Tor, the browser works very well straight out of the box. Tor uses a volunteer network of over 7,000 nodes, (connection points) in a random fashion in order to hide your real IP address, thereby hiding your physical address.
Security Features of Tor
- Complex Data encryption before being sent over the Internet.
- Automatic data decryption at client side.
- It is a combination of Firefox Browser + Tor Project.
- It makes it possible to visit locked websites. (.onion)
That last feature is one that many people are not aware. The .onion host suffix sites. These are sites that all end with .onion and look like Top Level Domains (TLDs), but are not actually registered in the DNS system which is why non Tor browsers can not access them. They are only available to the Tor network. For example: BBC News, http://bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion/. The purpose of these .onion sites is to make your online activity even more difficult to trace.
Use a VPN service
A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is an online service that allows your browser to connect to the internet though one the VPN’s IP addresses. That means that your location is hidden. The VPN’s IP addresses are usually scattered around the world and a good VPN service would offer hundreds of IP addresses scattered over a hundred different countries. Some VPN services will randomly change your IP every 30 minutes or every hour. Others allow you to choose an IP in a certain country.
A few other common features of VPNs:
- VPNs encrypt all the data you send over the internet.
- Your VPN also masks your IP address.
- Some VPNs block malicious websites, ads, and trackers.
According to most security experts, a good VPN is the simplest and most secured method of evading content blocking.
VPN Over Tor
The next step up in anonymity would be using both a VPN and Tor. This makes if virtually impossible for you to be tracked or traced since no one would know that you are using Tor. Simply login to you VPN service and then open your Tor browser.
Other Content Blocked
Then again, it’s not always an authoritarian country that is blocking content. This image was sent to me from a friend that lives in the Philippines. It’s part of a news article by NBC News published on news.yahoo.oom. He says he gets these “not available” blocks a few times every week. He could easily bypass that blocking with either of the techniques above. So, in his case, it’s probably the entire Philippines that is blocked from that image.