How to bypass Internet censorship? – Circumvention

If the Internet is heavily censored, you have to think about different ways to get out your information. For example, if you want to write about filtering on your blog, because the word "filtering" itself is blocked, and putting it on your text will lead to being blocked. So the people write "filtering" in different formats. And sometimes they call it "hitlering", you know. Everybody knows what they are talking about. I certainly want to resist the idea that there are some countries where the Internet is just free and everything is perfect, and then other countries where it's repressive. Circumvention is any method used to get around censorship, to access content that would otherwise be blocked. So the experience of circumvention is sometimes described as a kind of contest, between the censors and the circumventors. Because circumventors come up with a particular tactic and then censors figure out how to recognize and block that tactic. You're tunneling around something, or a relay race where information is passed around a firewall that's blocking content. Sound would be a little bit more difficult to describe though, since there is penalties for circumvention in some places, ideally it would be silence. I often feel quite pessimistic about this because when I think of particular circumvention technologies and particular circumvention means, it seems that many of them would have a very distinctive fingerprint that would be recognizable. So the censors could program a firewall to look for that particular fingerprint and block everything that looks that way. You should be very aware, if you enter this room, that, just by using circumvention tools, you can actually get in quite a lot of trouble. So it's not that you may even be accessing content which is deemed inappropriate (...... ) or whatever, but actually the process of engaging the circumvention can be problematic, depending on where you are. On of the limits of circumvention is that in some places people get in a lot of trouble if they're caught using circumvention. And so it can be very risky and it can be a big ethical problem whether to recommend circumvention technologies to people. If you imagine a situation where someone is going to be punished for getting around censorship, then it's very scary to tell them: "Oh, just use this tool and get around the censorship." Every tool has it's limits, so for example a simple Web proxy is often not working very well together with Facebook or Gmail or Youtube. So I always tell people that knowing computer programming is very empowering and I think it's clearly the case with regard to circumvention. So if you want to use the Internet, and you want to get advantage of the Internet, you have to be able to use circumvention tools. So most of the users I can say, they know how to circumvent.