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Circumventing Censorship
A quick guide to tools for circumventing censorship, published in several editions of The Times of India, July 19, 2006, in the wake of the apparently government-mandated ban on blogging sites. Because each edition carried a differently edited version depending on space constraints, here is my full-length version.
| Original Introduction | Revised Introduction |
|---|---|
Several internet users in India this week woke up to a groggy Monday. The usual hangover, sleepy ride to work, even their favourite blogs took forever to load. Wait a minute. Rewind that. What happened to the blogs? With the wakeful afternoon came the realisation that the government had banned them. Banned everything on BlogSpot.com, perhaps India’s most popular hosting spot. But had they? Several of India’s more active bloggers converged to form a new group to pool updates on the issue. By Tuesday, it emerged that the government had in fact not asked for all of BlogSpot to be blocked, only an obscure blog, as part of their regular drive at censoring unpleasant voices. ISP customer service centres for their part continued to maintain that BlogSpot was blocked by government directive, but refused to divulge more because the directive was confidential. |
Censorship is an everyday part of life. Authorities routinely practise it to smoothen out potential social disruptions. The practice is so ingrained into our social fabric that many would view the lack of censorship as unpleasant — that the act of censoring is a filter that moderates unpleasantness out of our life. But sometimes the process can go wrong, like last week, when the Department of Telecommunications sent a routine directive to Indian ISPs to block access to some websites that were against the national interest. In the process of implementing the ban, several ISPs ended up cutting off access to tens of thousands of blogs. Bloggers across the country have been raging over the matter, but two days later, it remains unresolved. |
Fortunately, technology makes it trivial to circumvent such mistaken censorship. The methods fall into two categories.
One, if your ISP goofed up and blocked the wrong site, what you want is to gingerly step around the block using a proxy. The simplest way to achieve this is with Torpark, a project that combines the Firefox browser and the Tor anonymous proxy service into a single point-and-click install for Windows users. Get it from http://torpark.nfshost.com/
Torpark behaves exactly like the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers you are familiar with, but is unaffected by censorship.
Tor operates a series of proxy routers around the world that pass your pages through at least three random routers before delivering them to you. This ensures that your ISP does not know what sites you are accessing, and hence cannot block them. The more people who use Tor, the more effective it becomes against wrongful censorship. You can read more about Tor at http://tor.eff.org/
Or perhaps if you are not comfortable downloading something, you can try the Coral cache network. Coral was designed for a different purpose, to reduce the load on websites and hence reduce the cost of hosting them. Coral works with your existing web browser. It does not require a special download. If, for example, you wanted to visit the Mumbai Help blog at http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com but found it blocked, try typing http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080. That will load it through Coral. For any other site, just add “.nyud.net:8080” to the domain name. That is all it takes. If Coral is blocked too, another proxy may be used by appending “.cob-web.org:8888”. You can read more about Coral at http://www.coralcdn.org/
Two, if you are stuck behind a corporate firewall that is severely restricted (very few are), the Tor and Coral networks may themselves be unreachable. In this case, you’ll have to settle for a simpler if somewhat inconvenient manual proxy. One such is ShySurfer. Go to http://www.shysurfer.com, type in the address of the site you want to access, and hit Browse. ShySurfer will load the page for you. If you want to follow any link on the page however, you will have to repeat the process. Instead of clicking on the link, right-click on it, select “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link” (depending on your browser), go back to shysurfer.com, and paste into the box there. This is the unfortunate cumbersome process you have to put up with for being in a restricted network.
Yet another means of circumventing censorship is to use a web based feedreader. This is straightforward and convenient, but only works for blogs. To use it, go to a feedreader site such as www.bloglines.com or www.google.com/reader and register for an account. Select the option to subscribe to a new blog or new feed, and enter the address of the site you want to visit. The site will then let you browse the blog, but with the blog’s theme replaced with the feedreader site’s. You may find that feedreader sites are overall a better way to keep track of blogs.
This isn’t the exhaustive list of circumventing censorship. Owing to space limits, we’ve only covered the simplest ways of getting around your ISP’s mistake. Should you be interested in other methods, the bloggers who came together in the aftermath of the weekend’s ban have put together a collection of guides. It’s available at http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bypassing_The_Ban
