In the cat-and-mouse game of Internet censorship in China, the mice will always be ahead. As Wall Street Journal reports, some savvy web users are using a rather simple method for viewing restricted content:
Most computers, running both Windows and OS X (and smartphones running Android), contain a host file, which is a document with a list of Internet Protocol addresses (the back-end address accessed by a computer when a website name is typed into a web browser’s search bar). Copying and pasting new addresses into that file allows a computer to directly access particular websites. As a result, updating the list to include recent IP addresses for websites like Facebook, and then entering those sites’ addresses into a browser with a secure “https://” in place of “http://” in front of the address will allow users to get onto many blocked Western sites, and without the slower speeds and fees associated with most VPNs.
Does it work? If you’re also an Internet savvy type, please give it a try and let us know. (I’m very comfortably logged on to my Witopia, thank you very much.)
Yeah, this works. Unfortunately, as with just about any free VPN alternative, when enough people know of it so will the censors, and this will be shut down.
Thanks assholes for turning this into news and getting it shut down.
This only works when a website changes its ip address, you can then directly access its new ip address. But for really seriously blocked sites like youtube and facebook they will update the ip ban fairly quickly and sites dont change their ip addresses that often and you need to have a vpn to find out the new ip address anyway. Some sites are only blocked at the domain name, but sites like facebook and youtube are blocked at domain name, ip and even dns lookup