John Doe, or in its Indian context, Ashok Kumar, may just sound like the average male name to you, but to Indian Internet users, such unimaginative sounding names-placeholder nominals for a party whose true identity is unknown or must be withheld in a legal action-have taken on a rather painful significance. It's on the back of these John Doe/Ashok Kumar court orders that some Indian Internet service providers (ISPs) have recently gone ahead and blocked a number of torrent websites. Also affected are a fair number of legitimate video sharing websites, like Vimeo and DailyMotion, which are used by a number of creative professionals to share their commercial content.
Now, while we at G&G do not condone the use of torrent and video-sharing websites to share copyrighted content, there's a fair case to be made that it isn't the medium that should be punished, since it is the very same medium that lets you download the Ubuntu Linux distribution, OpenOffice software and tonnes of copyright-free content much faster than direct browser-based downloads. With that said, here are our top tips to access websites blocked by over-zealous ISPs.
| We do not condone the use of torrent and video-sharing websites to share copyrighted content, but there is a fair case to be made that it isn't the medium that should be punished, since it is the very same medium that lets you download open software and copyright-free content. |
FOXY PROXIES: As the name suggests, proxy websites allow you to piggyback on their Internet connection (via your browser) to bypass your ISP's restrictions. Most popular services like Proxify, HideMyAss and Anonymise.us operate in the same way, needing you only to enter the URL of the site you want to access. The proxy service then creates a passageway or tunnel for you to access your content. Be warned that some websites may not render properly since proxies usually tend to clean up extra images and scripts from the websites they fetch for you.
TURBO-CHARGED BROWSING: A variation on the proxy approach is to use the Opera web browser, which via its Turbo mode (or via Opera Mini on your mobile) uses Opera servers to compress and fetch content from anywhere on the web to your phone or desktop. Oh, and there are tonnes of proxy plugins for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer too.
D.N.SLEIGHT OF HAND: Domain Name Servers (DNS) are key to the Internet's functioning, regularly translating names like google.com to its associated IP address each time your computer makes a browser-based request. Your ISP preconfigures its own DNS servers in your Internet settings each time you connect to the Internet, so the easiest way for them to block websites is to remove the entries for say vimeo.com in its DNS server. Fortunately, there are a number of free DNS services run by folks such as OpenDNS and Google, and all you need to do is open up your wireless/network connection properties in the Control Panel and manually enter the IP address of the DNS server of your choice- 8.8.8.8 for Google and 208.67.220.220 for OpenDNS. It's the Internet equivalent of "just asking someone else" for information.
TOR-A! TOR-A!: One of the most popular tools to subvert ISP bans is a nifty little utility called Tor. Download the software from torproject.org and once installed, the program will connect to the Tor network and give you unencumbered access to the World Wide Web.
CACHE-AND-BURN!: If none of these work, and all you have access to is Google, you can use its cacheing capabilities to open up blocked content. All you need to do is enter the words "Cache:" followed by the website/URL you need to browse. What this does is that instead of taking you to the actual (blocked) website, it loads up the most recently cached version of the page from Google's cache servers. You could also use Google's Translate website (translate.google.com) to achieve the same result.
VPN-IFY YOUR INTERNET: For those who depend on sites like Vimeo and Pastebin for work, a pricier solution may be to invest in a virtual private network (VPN) which sets up a secure tunnel through your ISP's data connection through to a VPN service provider which has an unfettered Internet connection at the other end. Free alternatives do exist, such as sites like UltraVPN and CyberGhost, but these usually have download and / or speed limits in place. An alternative is to invest in a seedbox- dedicated high-speed Internet-connected machines, which let you download torrents onto them directly, and you can then transfer the downloaded files at your convenience via regular browser-based (HTTP) download.
