Ways to Bypass SOPA Censorship

It will probably happen. SOPA will pass. Despite the massive opposition to it, Congress, a bunch of old people who have likely never used the Internet, seems poise to pass the horrible bill.

Still, all might not be lost. Plan A was to stop it, but Plan B is to work around it. Where there's a will there's a way. As a personal side note, in high school, sites like Facebook, YouTube, and pretty much every game site was blocked. But there were always ways around the censorship. It became a sort of cat and mouse game between students and county officials in charge of the blocking. At first, there were proxies. Once those were blocked, people turned toward something called "UltraSurf", which worked for a couple years. Then, once that stopped working, people went back to proxies but scoured through lists of web proxies to find one that wasn't blocked, which of course there always were.

But perhaps the most interesting part of all of this was how word spread. Every workaround sort of went viral within the school system. As an example, with UltraSurf, someone I know found it and copied the file to my flash drive. I gave it to a few people, who gave it to a few more people, and within a week everyone had it. The same thing happened when I downloaded a portable version of Halo: Combat Evolved. I gave it to a few people, who gave it to a few more, and within a few weeks, everyone had it. It actually created a big problem because it slowed down the school network to a crawl. My point is that even if the government uses a different type of blocking, a workaround will be found and once it is, it will go viral, maybe even if it's just in flash drive form.

The type of blocking the government would use in SOPA is called DNS blocking. It's a rather simple type of blocking, which means unblocking could be simple as well. Basically what it does is that it blocks you entering www.site.com into your address bar without taking down the site. Already, workarounds are being found. This is called "DeSopa"

A developer who calls himself T Rizk doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation, so he's built a work around for the impending censorship measures being considered DeSOPA. The Firefox add-on is stunningly simple as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would block specific domain names of allegedly infringing sites.

Firefox, which already boasts an outspoken stance against SOPA, and has already shown they are willing to stand by add-on developers who create circumvention extensions designed to go around measures currently employed by Homeland Security, has welcomed a new add-on, one that is designed to circumvent whatever SOPA website blacklists that are created, provided the bills become law.

A new anti-SOPA add-on for Firefox, titled “DeSopa” is such a counter measure.When installed, users can click a single button to resolve a blocked domain via foreign DNS servers, bypassing all domestic DNS blockades and allowing the user to browse the site though the bare IP-address (if supported).“I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” DeSopa developer T Rizk told.

“It could be that a few members of congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down,” he adds.

thehackernews.com...
DeSopa Download Link (it's a FireFox plugin)

I'm sure many more workaround will appear and if you find any, feel free to post them here. But it should be noted that many people will not stand for this and there WILL be workarounds to access a Post-SOPA Internet.

All someone has to do is set up a DNS server or a site with a DNS interface. DNS basically turns www.sopasucks.com to xx.xx.xx.xx. Once you know the ip...you are there. This does not mean they will stop there, and at best...people will start using better DNS servers like their ISPs which track most of the crap anyway.

does this work for US only or can be used for other countries like mine UAE which we've been having a similar thing to SOPA called proxies ever since we had the internet ?

Ive only just started reading about SOPA today and so im not well informed as to how the mechanics of the blocking actually works however if they are just blocking the ISP's DNS then yeah you could easily circumvent the censorship by using a different DNS server but i think it would be different if they were actually blocking the actual authoritative name server. (The authoritative name server is the main name server for that site that all other name servers would contact)