While the government promised you acche din’ not even a single MP promised you acchi raatein. So, here comes another ban – your favourite porn website is now blocked in a country that wrote the definitive sex manual.
Please observe a minute of silence for the fact that legislators can watch porn at work but you can’t, even in a locked room!
A twitter debate over the weekend suggested the end of porn watching in India. On most internet service providers (ISPs) – including Vodafone, MTNL, ACT, Hathway and BSNL – porn sites were inaccessible.
So, if you were searching for popular porn sites like Pornhub or Redtube, you ended up on blank pages. This might happen for a few more months as reports suggest that more that 800 porn websites will be blocked in the country.
I hope these guys know that there are over a million porn websites and they can’t block them all even if they wanted to, which they clearly do.
And no one can make you stop watching porn (if you’re into that kind of stuff)! So here are 5 ways you can still access porn sites, even if they are blocked.
1. Get on a VPN (Virtual Private Network)
A VPN or Virtual Private Network helps you encrypt traffic between your device and the VPN server. This will keep you safe and also give you access to your favourite porn website. You can get a VPN easily on your Android or iOS smartphone. Get a VPN for your computer here.
2. Change Your DNS Server
A DNS server is like an index with a list of domain names. When you type in a website address in your browser, your device sends a request to the DNS server and then an ISP can choose to redirect the request to a different site or a blank page as in the case of porn. A simple DNS server change could open up your connection. There are many free, fully open third-party DNS services on the internet. The most popular ones are run by Google and OpenDNS. All you need to do is change your DNS server settings to theirs and enjoy the acchi raat.
3. Proxy Servers
Remember how in school computer labs, Orkut was blocked and you could just go to a proxy service and access the social network?
This is exactly the same. You get a lot of proxies on the world wide web that allow you to use their Internet connection, thus bypassing most of the restrictions set up by the ISPs or the network administrators. A quick Google search for ‘anonymous browsing proxy’ will give you a long list of services available on the web.
4. Go Dark
If the normal web stops you from making yourself happy, just go dark. Download a Tor browser and go anonymous. This will get you on the Tor network. This lets you enter the world of the Deep Web, or as many restrictors like to call it Dark Web. Everything is accessible to a user on Tor, including porn. This one is the easiest way to go anonymous and get access. Dowload the Tor browser here.
5. Use Cached Pages
Another easy way to get things rolling is to use cached search. This might give you limited access to your favourite porn website. This mirrored content is refreshed quite often, so you won’t be left with outdated content. The only downside in using this technique is that you may not be able to use interactive content, such as streaming media. Even a Google search can get you a cached link to your favourite porn site.
Go ahead and enjoy. Just remember to lock the room.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)