Advertisment

How users unblock torrent sites

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: Hacker consortium Anonymous's Distributed Denial of Service attack on the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) website on Wednesday has once again served as a dire reminder of the ongoing protests against Internet censorship in India.

Advertisment

The whole hullabaloo began last July, when the Department of Telecom (DoT) ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to block several file-sharing websites, like Megavideo, Mediafire and Hotfile and Rapidshare.

Most recently, on May 17, a Madras High Court order proscribed certain websites from violating the copyrights of Kolaveri-fame Tamil movie '3' and Dammu in Telugu, by putting their video and audio content up for public sharing.

The DoT took a cue from the pre-emptive order and blocked a lot many video- and file-sharing websites, including Vimeo, DailyMotion.com, Isohunt.com, thepiratebay.org, torrentz.eu, kat.ph and pastebin.com, even if the order didn't specify that all those sites should be banned.

Advertisment

In protest, Anonymous has planned peaceful street demonstrations — which incidentally will follow the 'brutal attack' on MTNL — in Bangalore, Delhi, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and other cities on Saturday.

Also read: To protest until censorship stops: Anonymous

Amid all this mêlée, some ingenious minds have either deviced or are capitalizing on certain loopholes to unblock the blanket ban on such sites.

Advertisment

Here are a few options they use, not necessarily in the order of their preference:

IP address route

On paper, this strategy seems the most impressive. As the ban is imposed based on the domain names, using the IP addresses of file-sharing sites is a great option to break through to the blocked site.

Advertisment

If you are wondering how to know the IP address of a particular website, just log in to http://www.who.is. Voila, there you go!

Beatin' it with proxy

Even in the ever-vigilant China, proxy sites pose a big threat to online security. There are too many proxy sites to name, so you can visit one and in the box for the site name, enter the URL of the specific torrent website you want to open.

Advertisment

Once the torrent site opens, it's business as usual.

DNS- & browser-specific unlock

If you are using Google DNS, you can browse through this literature to get enlightened and also to figure out the loopholes to access blocked sites:

Advertisment

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/intro.html

On Opera browser, you can get a Turbo add-on and it would break for you all shackles, for a free sharing world. Check it out here: http://www.opera.com/browser/turbo/.

Yes, we can hear you saying that there are many other ways, some easier than listed above, to crack the DoT block code. How about listing them out?

tech-news