BUST INTERNET GEOBLOCKS

COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE: HOW TO GET COMPLETE & UNRESTRICTED ACCESS TO ANY WEBSITE OR STREAMING SERVICE ON ALL OF YOUR DEVICES!

SO YOU LIKE your internet unfiltered, with access to the full array of services and sites without any censors or geoblocks getting in the way. You’d like to be able to watch UK streaming TV services online, access Amazon Prime or Netflix US and visit sites that would otherwise be restricted. This is the guide for you.

We’re going to be looking at various ways you can get around different types of restrictions on all your devices. In particular, we’ll walk through the four most common ways you can access an unrestricted internet.

FOUR WAYS TO GET AROUND BLOCKS

Before we get into platform specifics, we should talk at a high level about these different solutions, and what they’re good (and not so good) for.

DNS

The domain name service (DNS) is like the White Pages of the internet. It takes humanreadable URLs like techlife.net and translates them into IP addresses.

As noted in the sidebar ‘How the new site restrictions are being implemented’ (right), ISPs have begun using the trick on modifying their DNS servers so that certain sites can’t be looked up — kind of like ripping their entries out of the White Pages. The sites are still there, and still accessible, but your computer won’t be able to look up their IP address.

Well, it won’t be able to unless you make a single, simple modification to your internet settings. If your ISP’s directory has been modified, then just use somebody else’s. For most people, that somebody else is Google, which runs its own (very fast) DNS servers. The address of that server is 8.8.8.8 (8.8.4.4 for the secondary) and you just need to modify your DNS server address to that to get unrestricted access. In lieu of Google, some people prefer to use OpenDNS ( at 208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220.

VPN

VPN services are a catch-all solution for hiding your activity from snooping ISPs and for hiding your country of origin from media services.

When you connect to a VPN, an encrypted tunnel is created between you and a server run by the VPN provider. All your data is sent along that tunnel, and the VPN provider then relays it to its destination. This has two effects — your ISP can only see that you’re communicating with the VPN provider and no one else; and all your traffic appears to come from the VPN server, so that sites you visit will think you’re visiting from the same

country that the VPN server is in. If the VPN server is in the US, your traffic appears to come from the US, bypassing geoblocks.

For most people, VPNs serve as the all-in-one solution for getting around site restrictions.

TOR

Tor, formerly known as ‘The Onion Router’, is an anonymising network that sits on top of the regular internet. Like a VPN, it allows you to route through other parties, obscuring both your source IP address from sites you visit and your destination IP address from your ISP.

Unlike a VPN, however, you’re not routing through a fixed server. You’re routing through other Tor users. Your traffic will bounce between at least three other Tor users on its way to its destination (the traffic is encrypted, so they can’t read it) completely obscuring its origin.

Tor represents pretty much the ultimate in internet freedom. It works around every restriction and can unlock any site, and there’s nobody that can monitor your activity online. There are even Tor-specific sites called Tor hidden services, accessible only to Tor users.

Although it’s great at working around content blocks, it’s not great for media. All that data bouncing around results in lowest-common-denominator speeds, so you’re not going to be able to stream Netflix with it, for example.

PROXY

A proxy server is a device that works much like a VPN above, allowing you to route through an intermediary (the proxy), which obscures your destination from your ISP/network provider (they can only see you connecting with the proxy server), as well as your country of origin from the destination website. They’re most commonly used as a simple and easy way to get around work and school website restrictions, but can also be used to fool ISP blocks.

In general, there are two types of proxies that you might use. The most common type is the web-based proxy. These are simply web pages that you visit, give them a URL and they will relay the page to you (usually in a browser frame). People often use Google Translate as a web-based proxy, but if you want a dedicated proxy page you can try www.filterbypass.me, newipnow.com and proxy.org, the last of which has a list of web proxy services.

Alternatively, there are the true HTTP/ SOCKS proxies. This is where you go into your internet settings and modify the proxy settings so that all your browser traffic flows through the proxy. You can find a list of some of the available free and open servers at

though these tend to be very, very slow. There are also commercial anonymous proxy services available, sometimes in conjunction with VPN services and sometime standalone (such as TorGuard’s Anonymous Proxy). Only the commercial ones really stand a chance at being fast enough for media streaming.