No way you can block blogs!

BANGALORE: Internet users woke up to an unusual Monday: Their favourite blogs were not available. What happened to the blogs? Slowly came the realisation that government had banned them. Banned ever-ything! Or ha-d they really?

By Tuesday, it became clear that the government had in fact asked for all of Blogspot to be blocked. As things turned out, it was an obscure blog on the Blogspot network that government was targeting as part of its regular drive at censoring unpleasant voices. Internet Service Providers who received the directive, though, simply banned the entire network.

Fortunately, technology can circumvent censorship. The methods fall into two categories. One, if your ISP blocked the wrong site and you want is to step around the block, the simplest way 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 at ttp://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 service provider does not know what sites you are accessing, and hence cannot block them. You can read more about Tor at http://tor.eff.org.

Two, if you are stuck behind a corporate firewall that is restricted (very few are), the Tor and Coral networks may themselves be unreachable. In this case, you’ll have to settle for a simpler proxy. One such is shysurfer. Go to http://w-ww.shysurfer.com, type in the address of the site you want to access, and hit Browse.

ShySurfer will load the page for you. This isn’t an exhaustive list of circumventing censorship. We have only covered the simplest ways of getting around your ISP. Should you be interested in other methods, check out http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bypassing_The_Ban. (Kiran Jonalagadda is a Bangalore-based blogger)