[WTF]Court orders to block 472 Websites? Workarounds are here

Department of Telecom (DoT) has issued Court order to block a number of BitTorrent sites including Vimeo, GoogleDocs, goo.gl, KickAssTorrents, The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, etc to stop piracy and many ISPs have implemented the orders.

Well, we are among those who think free and open internet should be our birthright. We know our rights, what is illegal and we strive not to violate them in any form. But due to all the pirates around we are also facing this irrational blockage. There are legitimate torrents of software especially open source which depend on torrent mode. Vimeo is where small film makers can share there creative works. While goo.gl is just a URL shortening service Sites like Google Docs is used by a large number of people for their daily work.

So here is a list of some workarounds to overcome this silly ban and resume work.

Tor/Tails

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows users their privacy and security on the Internet. It bounces your connection over a network of computers to build an encrypted circuit and thereby protects you from snooping. And thus all the blocked sites can be accessed

Google DNS/Open DNS

DNS (Domain Name System) is what translates an IP address to an easy to remember host-name. Thus, Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses.Every time a website is visited, the computer performs a DNS lookup.So, changing DNS may let access blocked websites. Additionally internet speed improvements can also be expected. Here is complete guide to do this on HowtoGeek.

Proxy (Sites/Software/Extensions).

A proxy server is a machine that sits between user and the rest of the Internet. So,when you are surfing the web through a proxy, any web servers you connect to, actually think you are connecting from the proxy computer. Proxies are of two type: HTML and SOCKS. Html proxies are cheaper and often free. Proxy sites employ these. The above mentioned Tor makes use of SOCKS. This is stronger, more expensive and a bit slower. This Wikihow article explains how to use web proxies.

Sites: Hidemyass, Anonymouse, Proxy.org are generally the most well known and recommended ones. Alternatively bestproxysites.net maintains a list of free proxy sites online.

Software: These need to be installed on the users PC and all the web traffic is routed through them. Example PlatinumHideIP.

Extensions: These work within the web browser. Example Anonymox, Hide my ass, Hola Unblocker

VPN

Virtual Private Networks create an private tunnel between your computer and the host. This tunnel is encrypted using at-least a 128 bit encryption. Using this can percent internet censorship as the government or ISP can only see a connection being made to a VPN service and nothing more. See CyberGhostVPN, OpenVpn.