How to get around censorship

The Great Firewall of Australia is still being worked upon by the evil legal minions of Senator Conroy. At the time of writing, it’s not illegal to tell you how to bypass censorware. I’m hoping that the legislation has no retrospective provisions in it (which would be really evil).

Here’s how you get around censorship in case Australia decides to become a totalitarian state and block free and unfettered access to the Internet.

Free and pretty easy

• Tor. Install Tor into Firefox. Done.
• Anonymizing Proxies. This is the easiest path, especially if you don’t use Firefox. Find one that is hosted outside of Australia. There’s heaps available.
• P2P software helps transfer files around, but I only use this for downloading Ubuntu ISO’s. Seriously. Don’t breach copyright – it’s how I make a living. P2P is not particularly secure, and can be monitored and seeded by hostile entities.
• Most messenger programs allow file transfers. Again, don’t breach copyright. Most Messenger protocols are unencrypted and thus can be monitored, and realistically, how do you know the other party is not a dog? See Chat Roulette for proof of this principle.
• Most transparent ISP caches only work on port 80, and can’t work with SSL due to the way SSL works. Use SSL.
• Most transparent ISP caches only work on port 80. Go to sites on ports other than port 80, such as port 81, 8080 or similar.

Free, but might cost you your job

• Using head office’s proxy in another country. If you work at a large multi-national, use their proxy. Remember, most workplaces have anti-pr0n acceptable use policies, and they’re more likely to police them than Australia. Otherwise, Done.

Not free, but still fairly easy

• SSL reverse proxies. There’s a fair few of these services around. Done.
• VPN’s. Buy a Virtual Private Server (VPS) in another country, preferably the USA. Install OpenVPN, PPTP or IPsec on it. Done.
• Set up a local web proxy server that has child-parent caches. Set up a remote parent cache in another country, or subscribe to a remote cache service. Done.

There’s more ways to bypass this stupid proposal, but I’ll leave those off this list for now.

I seriously hope that there will be mass protests and heavy campaigning if there is any legislation tabled.

We need to show Senator Conroy that the government is truly misguided on this – voters unanimously don’t want to be censored. Parents don’t want it. ISPs and our entire IT industry doesn’t want it. The ALP support base hates it. Censoring Australia WILL lose the ALP power. It will allow all the tin pot failed nations on the planet to say, “We have the right to do this, Australia did it.”

We must resist this most evil proposal in any way possible. See you at the protests.