Article written by Online education portal
Censorship of media is a practice that governments all over the world have resorted to at one time or the other. Implementing filters for the Internet is yet another practice of this. If it blocks child pornography, extreme violence and gore etc., this is well and good; but it is unacceptable when it blocks freedom of speech. If you are facing a situation like this, here are a few ways to get around it.
• Get onto Google or Yahoo and run a search for the website you want. When it is displayed, do not click on the link. Instead click on the link to the cached copy.
• Subscribe to a VPN service. The connection between the proxy server and your computer is secure and therefore not open for monitoring.
• Use the PING command to obtain the website’s IP address (e.g. ping yahoo.com) and enter that into the address bar. Note that you have to enter http:// in front of the IP address.
• Use Google’s translate option to translate the website. It doesn’t matter if the site is already in English, the process of translation will enable you to access it.
• Instead of typing http:// in front, try using https://
A more permanent way to solve this problem is to lobby the government to change its policies. Get them to make the block list transparent and justify the names on that list. Even if it does not work immediately, keep persisting. Governments change with every election and there is always a chance that the next bunch of people in charge will listen to you.
